Live episode of Lazy Leverage with Jon Matzner!

stuff. And basically I'm having trouble with AI, not for the reasons that you probably think. I did the thing that everyone says you're supposed to do, which is extricate yourself from your small business so that you can think big thoughts, work on the business, not in the business, take a month off, et cetera. And so you, prior to the hitting record, you were showing me some of the amazing stuff that you're doing with AI within Sagan. Like you're pulling up Airtable, you're like searching records, you're clicking links, and you were just telling me how you basically built this with one of your team members. And it kind of, it kind of made me jealous because I love doing that stuff and it's been a long time since I've been involved at that level. And if I was tasked with rolling out some of the AI stuff that you showed me in my business, I wouldn't even know where to start because I've been so disconnected from day-to-day operations for so long that I just literally don't even know who does things at my company anymore. And it's kind of sad, and it's also a little disturbing to know that there's probably a bunch of workflow improvements and AI optimizations and streamlining that I should be doing at my property management company, but I'm not. Uh, and it's actually got me a little nervous Um, so wanted to get your take on this, and we've got some other fun stuff to talk about too after that.

I have good news for you.

Okay, great.

The good news for you is, based on my experience over the last year or two, and I think not from a deep tech standpoint but from an implementation standpoint, Sagan is in the top 1% of 1% of real businesses using AI.

I think you're correct.

Like actually using it, not like I use it to rewrite emails. I think that there's really only one person who can meaningfully drive AI adoption within kind of core workflows, which is its founder or someone like a founder. And I remember 6 months ago we talked about John Wilson saying, look, you as the CEO or the founder can take things to the metal, take things to the bedrock. And actual AI adoption, not rewriting emails AI, but like no shit replacing core processes must be done by the founder or, or someone with that level of stature. It is not gonna be you send them to like one 2-hour class and magically your OpEx starts decreasing because of your use of AI. And so what I would say is kind of like founders doing all the sales in the beginning until you've created the motion. Similarly, I don't think you are the person. It's just a matter of how you kind of insert yourself as the chief AI officer within RL, which we can talk about. But there's, this is not best done from the bottom up based on my experience. It doesn't, it doesn't take for a whole variety of reasons, which we could talk about. So it, you have the mandate and it's not gonna happen accidentally. And it could be you, it could be your president, it could be, it's somewhat of that stature. It is not an organic bottoms up thing. From what I'm seeing.

It reminds me of— I mean, even if we set aside AI for a second, like process, sort of fundamental process improvements, it's a similar motion. And that what you're saying really resonates with me, like the drastic process improvements and process changes that I did do at RL Property Management over the last 12 years was mostly all driven by me. And it's not that the people who work for me aren't smart enough. They definitely are. For— there's a couple things going on. It's like the incentives aren't aligned. Um, they're also just not geared to think that way because it's context.

Context.

Yeah. They don't have the context of the larger, um, business situation. Um, I'll give you a little insight if you're listening.

They also, by the way, they also have day jobs. That's the other thing I've seen. You don't have really a day job, which lets you do this stuff.

Yeah.

That person has 7 maintenance tickets and you're like, yo, I really think you should look at, you know, deep seek. And they're like, bro, I got 7 maintenance tickets. I think it's Peter Lohmann. Like, stop sending me Twitter threads. So I think I cut you off, but that's the other thing I think too, is they have day jobs.

I'll give you an insight into, you know, if you're listening to this and you're a business owner, you may forget what it's like to be a team member. And I get, I get reminded of that. I stay pretty close to our team and I like to be reminded about what it's like to be a team member. I was chatting with my leadership team about a potential new vendor at our company to replace a bunch of work that we're doing manually right now. But you could replace vendor with AI. It's the same idea. And I was like, oh, hey, what's— what about this one vendor? Like, we, we talked to them a couple times. You said you kind of liked them. You're looking at them. And the team, the leadership team member said, oh yeah, that solution that we talked about is great. And I was like, oh, okay. Like, why aren't we rolling, rolling it out? What's, what's going on? And they're like, oh, well then Kendra wouldn't have anything to do. Mic drop, right? And so that is how your team thinks about AI or doesn't think about AI. Um, and it— there's nothing right, like, wrong. It's not a moral problem, and it's not that the person who said that was stupid or anything like that. It's just, it's different when you're the business owner. Um, so I think about that a lot, that interaction that, that happened a couple months ago. And I think it's highly relevant if you are trying to get your team to use AI and roll it out and you're not yet seeing the gains that you expect.

What I think— I saw some paper or study or something that said like AI use at work is ubiquitous, meaning like everybody's using it, but it is not— the value is not being captured at the company level, which I have some thoughts about why not and why we are. But it is the same thing where Every person on your team is using ChatGPT to write emails. Every single person at RL. Has that reduced OpEx, driven faster growth, increased your expectations on owner, owner investor service? No, but they're all using ChatGPT. So that, that, you know, gap is where I think if I wanted to quit Sagan right now, I could be a consultant on bridging the gap between individual tactical use of AI, or even for that matter, Global talent, you could say the same thing. Oh, it's easy to get an assistant, but using global talent at a strategic lever to do faster inorganic growth, that takes management buy-in and change management and all this shit. But tactically, dude, anybody can get a VA to do their freaking scheduling emails. So I think that gap between bridging the tactical improvement with strategic relevance is where if you're onto this and you're listening to this, I think you're gonna create a gap between you and your competitors because we use AI and it's like, It's not strategically interesting. It's tactically novel.

Yeah, you're definitely on another level with how you think about this and how you implement it at your own company. Um, you're exactly right that the value is not accruing to companies and people aren't thinking strategically about how to use AI. And it's all back to the Matzner's hierarchy of leverage, uh, or whatever we're calling that thing. It's the same thing. It's the exact same thing with systems and processes and automation and global talent. It's all related. It's all like driving tasks down to the lowest cost solve. And what ends up happening is like if your team is just using AI, they're just getting their work done a little faster.

Correct.

But nothing structural is changing or happening. It's just a very minor blip. It's a little easier for them, it's a little more comfortable for them.

Correct.

Maybe the customer has a 5% better experience with a nicer email.

Accidentally, they have a better experience.

Yeah. But you're talking like the way you think about things is just a wholesale rip and replace of entire departments and functions and processes that are just getting— I just picture you like, you like jumping up and down on them until they pop out the next level down on the hierarchy.

That's exactly—

or hammering at them, hammering at them, hammering, hammering, hammering. It's like, no, no, no. And you just drive it down, drive it down, drive it down. And like, it starts with like little pieces here, little pieces there, and you keep working at it, you keep working at it, and soon the whole thing is down two levels, right?

Um, and I think there's a— there's— oh, sorry, finish, I cut you off.

Yeah, it's just most people aren't thinking that way, and When I even think about doing this in my own company, frankly, it feels extremely overwhelming and daunting, and it makes me just want to go start a brand new company because the idea of coming in—

does it intimidate you to do it at Crane?

Not in Crane, because Crane's still young and nimble and early days, right? But at RO Property Management, 12-year-old company, 30 team members, you know, it's like, I'll just start, I'll just start a new one. It'll be easier to start clean.

To use the $5 word, it's a bit ossified.

Yeah, not— and I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. But so how, how, how should I be thinking about this? Like what if I was a con— I almost need to be thinking as if like I'm a third-party consultant coming into my own company.

Absolutely correct.

But I don't know how to do that.

So the first thing I would say is, and I've had some really fun conversations with our leadership team too, because like where we're growing but their headcounts are reducing and they're like, right. So some really interesting conversations with our executive team too. But the thing, um, the only other thing I was going to say about how this is all tied to pushing work down to the lowest cost, whatever. I think there's one missing piece here that is so freaking important. That process of driving things downward then needs to be tied into your strategic vision for the company. Meaning you're not doing it, you're not creating systems and processes so that you can show off your Notion on Twitter. You're creating it so that you can go acquire other sub-500-door properties and finally start growing RL with an inorganic growth strategy because you're—

or, well, it needs to be in service of one of those three strategies that you articulate so well.

Correct.

Either customer intimacy or what are the other two?

So customer intimacy, product innovation, or operational excellence.

Yeah. So your AI projects or just any projects in general where you're trying to drive work down to the lowest level of the pyramid, which we should pop up the pyramid graphic. If we were fancy with shorts and everything, we'd have that on here. Um, uh, it needs to be in service of one of those three strategic—

and your vision for the company and your vision for the— it has to be tight. It's not an end in and of itself. Matzner's hierarchy of leverage is an enablement process that then says, okay, with this we can now reduce our management fee by 50% and go curb stomp other property managers in Columbus. Or with a 50% reduction in this OpEx, I can reinvest it into this part of the company, which is actually our constraint right now. Or I can add a new service, or I can— it's not— I think sometimes think process improvement or integration of AI or integration of global talent can be you know, mental masturbation if it's not in service of your strategic vision. It has to be in service. It's not just, we need to use AI because I saw this great tweet about it. It's like, why? Oh, so that we can then attack our competitors on their price point because they have high fixed costs and they're all using local talent and we can have a superior price point with better profitability because we went through the pain of transformation to to be able to do our turn checklists with lower-skilled labor. It has to be strategically coherent. I think that's where a lot of the nonsense is, is that people come in and it's tactical and it's like gimmicky almost. And it's like you haven't tied it to your VTO, to use EOS terms. And so it's just like this, it's this novelty that never really catches.

Yeah.

You know, like that's, that's so that's the first place I go is you have to tie it into your vision for RL. It shouldn't be done out of guilt. Oh, we should be doing more AI.

That's how I'm relating to it right now. It's out of guilt.

You're just like, oh, I know this could be so much better. Okay. Why? Like, what does it tie to? Does it tie to faster turns? Does it tie to lower fees? Does it tie to reduction in OpEx so you can plow it into content creation? Does it tie to speedier customer service? Like, what does it tie to? Which are your values, which in your vivid vision, how can you hang it against your vivid vision at RL? Because if it's not tied to that, it's just like, it's going to fucking fart out.

I think that's one of the challenges of being a third-party consultant in general is that you're brought in to solve a problem, but that problem is often not actually the problem. There's an actual—

you gave me a term for this.

Did you? X, Y problem.

XY problem. I wrote that down, it's on my quotes list. I'm like, XY problem, baby. So explain, remind—

so an XY problem is when someone attempts to solve a problem but it's not actually the problem. Um, so good. So an example would be like, if you— of course I have a hard time. I have a million examples. Okay, you, you give your example.

You, you come to me and you're like, yo, I need to hire an executive assistant because I get so much email. The answer is to tell your team, stop CCing me on every customer complaint, not to get an EA to go through your email faster.

Exactly.

So it's a great— you think it's a labor problem. And I'm like, it's a leadership and management problem.

Yeah.

So I see you show up already in a position of disadvantage. Yeah.

The evidence of an XY problem is a spreadsheet. You can quote me on that one. If your team is like, I know, we'll make a spreadsheet to track that. That's almost always the wrong answer. Um, you've got enough spreadsheets, you've got enough places to track things. You've got Airtable, you've got Notion, you've got software. Um, typically spreadsheets are used to— there's another, there's an old saying used to hear a lot, which is you're trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem. Uh, it's kind of a related type of idea, which is like people, you see this show up a lot when business owners are afraid to enforce their policies. Um, they're, they're afraid to take a hard line on a policy and enforce it, so instead they end up creating a maze of tracking spreadsheets and exceptions and policies to the policies with exceptions. And, um, that just—

they won't have the hard conversation.

Yeah, exactly.

The, the— I have a, I have a strong reaction to this XY problem, which is I think 90% of X, Y problems are just leadership issues. Is that maybe outside the engineering context? But like when I— 100% of the time, I don't even wanna say 90%, 100%, because I believe that it's ultimately almost everything comes back to strong or weak management leadership. It's like, well, we need a tool that tracks their mouse motion to know that they're working full days. And you're like, what are your managers doing? Are they doing one-on-ones? Do they have clear expectations? Do they know what success looks like? Do they inspect what they expect? Like when I think about X, Y problems that I run into, like, oh, you never clarified the job requirement. So when I started presenting candidates, you added requirements because you were never clear on what success in this new role looks like. That's a management. So when I think X, Y, at least in a service business, I'm like, yo, it's all leadership. It's all management. It's all Peter never sat down with his head of maintenance to say, you're messing this up and I need to give you training so that you stop messing this up, or I need to put you in a different seat because if you can't do this without a a detailed technical solution, you're just not the person here.

Yeah. And this is a challenge all consultants run into, um, branding consultants, sales consultants, process consultants. They're all brought in to solve some specific issue, but the good ones will end up having you questioning the meaning of life. Yeah, right. They end up asking you like, what's your rich life look like? Yeah, what do you want your life to look like in 10 years? I thought we were just getting a new logo.

I have one coaching people in person. We're about to do our offsite. I have one left. I love him. I'm— we'll work with him forever. And it's like, so like, how much do you want to go on vacation? It was like, wait, I thought we're talking about like, you know, systemization or something. I'm like, how much you want to go on vacation every year? Because until I know that, I can't tell you whether or not you should switch to Salesforce. You know, the, the, the other thing I will say as a reaction to this, and we'll continue our AI conversation, is we have Brian Wilson, who you've I think you've met. We're now within Sagan Experiments, we're doing a pilot right now where he's doing coaching, just straight executive coaching. 'Cause we're like, and it's free, it's included with Sagan. And it's just like, we have some people where we're like, bro, you don't need to put in more hiring requests. You need to sit down with Brian for an hour every other week and be like, yo, bro, you need to learn to like trust your team because they're really good and you're disempowering them.

Yeah.

Like, so we're experimenting with, with actually giving them leadership and management coaching because we're seeing that that's— dude, you don't need a— oh, I need like my own Bincy. It's like Bincy wouldn't work for you. You're a shitty manager. Like, the fact you even said it like that means that you're not ready for it. So we're actually experimenting with coaching within Sagan as a free benefit because of exactly this XY problem stuff.

Yeah, I often find that those types of people ask very specific, telling types of questions. One of them is, where did you find X? Yeah, where do you find your leads? Where did you find your Monica? Where did you find your BDM? Where did you find blah blah blah? They're very focused on like the, like that specific—

you send me the job post you posted, I'm like, bro, it said like—

here's the other question they love to ask. This is my favorite. I see this all the time. They're like, If you were doing this again, what would you do differently? That's the favorite question to ask of a non-action taker. It's a dead giveaway. It's like, dude, I don't know, just do it and then you'll know the answer for yourself and you can use it for next time. Okay. It's like my specific circumstances are irrelevant. Like, just, you know, if you were gonna start over all over again with your COOs, I'm like, you're never gonna hire a COO. Yeah, I can tell you right now.

Yep.

Because that's a weak question.

It's just the wrong attitude. Yeah, it's just like the wrong disposition.

I feel bad because like I think I asked— used to ask questions like that too, and like I get where the impulse is coming from, um, but I think that that type of a question is what someone asks when they know they need to do something but they're procrastinating or they're just lacking the courage to actually pull the trigger. It's like the analysis paralysis.

Yeah, or make a trade-off or Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So steering and tying this into the AI rollout stuff, I believe that this is— when I was— if somebody was to ask me, I believe that this is similar to like, you know, founder sales in the beginning of a company, which is you cannot delegate it until you've done it yourself. So that would be my first guidance for you, which is you are now, for the time being, the Chief AI Officer, Chief of AI or AI and Automation, right? Okay. That is your title. You cannot hire that. People, we see hiring requests all the time, like experience with AI. I'm like, bro, you cannot solve this at the tactical level unless it's like Zaps and it's like moving things in and out of Slack. But I don't think that that's what you're chasing. You're chasing like real. So that's the first thing I would say is, okay, if you want tactical AI, oh, build some custom GPTs and help my team like write better emails. Sure. But I think it takes the level of You know, hand on the scale of like CEO, founder, COO level, not, oh, we have a head of automation who makes $2,000 a month.

Like, yeah, unfortunately that's correct. Uh, it's gotta be the owner, you know, or like that level, like CEO, if it's not the owner or president.

So that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is. A lot of what it looks like is in the beginning, a lot of, and you know this, we did podcasts about this. A lot of what it looks like is playing.

Mm-hmm.

It looks like you getting in there and downloading a CSV from Airtable, just the ugliest fricking format you have, and just say, what kind of crap can I, I'm gonna go to Replit, I'm gonna go to Lovable, I'm gonna go to these other tools. I'm gonna upload it into GPT-5. I'm gonna just, I'm gonna go to Lindy.ai. I'm gonna see if I can create an agent that finds the most likely— Oh, that was dumb and I burned it. It looks like improvisation with somebody with a ton of context who's curious. And it just looks like in the beginning, it's not like you come out with this great— I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna AI the turn process. It's not formed enough. It's not science yet. It's art. It's touchpoints. It's asking John what automations— hey, can you show me some of the ones you've built from other sectors? It's not system. It's not prescriptive yet. Right? Like, and the things that are prescriptive are very tactical. It's like send your new property management leads to Slack. You're like, that's not strategically interesting. What's strategically interesting is I create a custom dashboard off of Airtable for every owner investor that we have now that tracks tax, maintenance requests, rent roll, total balance in their trust account. And I do it dynamically and it's updated every day with a password. You could 100% build that. Yeah, but you have to play.

That's what I agreed.

You know, how do you react to that?

It's exactly correct. And it reminds me all the way back to my engineering days, like when I was working as a control systems engineer.. And I was turning the crank on these projects that were all very similar to each other. And I started playing around with some of the new features that the software that we worked with was offering. And there was no end goal or destination. It wasn't something that my boss asked me to do. In fact, my boss got mad at me for doing it. But it was like, you just, you have to mess around with stuff to figure out what is possible and where the limitations are and what the software can do. And what the software can't do and how long things take and where it's reliable.

Where it's unreliable is a huge one, right?

Yeah, it's, you know, I don't know how to articulate that very well.

And it—

you have to be empowered to cut across all departments. That's why all data— it's, it's very—

yeah, the— have you read, um, any like Richard Feynman stuff? Yeah. This is very Feynman. Feynman started thinking about subatomic particles, I think, looking at a dish in 1945, and it led to the Nobel Prize. But he was just like, "I wonder why does it rotate this?" It's the pleasure of finding things out. You just have to go on this— you just have to have a kind of a laziness, like, "There's a better way. There's a better way. There's a better way," with a playfulness, which is like, Yo, wouldn't it be so cool if— and you just play around with it. You might burn 3 days. You know me, I go down a million rabbit holes. But that's what pushing the limit looks like. Do you think like—

I mean, you've done so much stuff that you've showed me. What— where do you— what's your way in? Because like when I think about this, I'm like, okay, I need to like do someone's job for a day. To figure out my way in? Or like, do you look at the P&L? Or like, where— how do you decide that like, okay, this is the thing, um, and here's how I'm gonna figure out what's currently happening here and then what is possible?

So I'll give you my, my first reaction, which is not really the right one. It's kind of like a joking answer, but then I'll give you like a real one. So my first reaction, for me, just because of the way my brain is wired, is what motivates me is competition. 100%. It's, I want to chew up and spit out Athena. I just want to, I want to BK them. I want to put them out of business. And so for me, that's what compels me to like drive the next level. It just, it motivates. It's just, I've been an athlete like that. I just, it fucking lights a fire in my brain that makes me just want to like destroy. Like through better service, better pricing, better speed, better quality. Like, so that's kind of like my soft answer about like what my way in is. My way in is that I have this fucking bonfire in my brain around competitive aggression. And I just channel that into trying to like improve our product or service. That's kind of like my soft answer. The real answer is the same as the way in for Lean. Which is if you look at lean manufacturing, it's fix what bugs you. It's fix what bugs you.

So like, I'll give it a lean manufacturing thing.

Yeah. Oh, it's like the first chapter is what bugs you. And it's like such a profound statement where it's like, well, how do I get started with lean? It's like, fix what bugs you. So when you make coffee in the morning and you have to go to the drawer to get the cinnamon, move the cinnamon next to the coffee.

Oh, I'm so into that type of thing, man. If I could spend my whole life making little optimizations like that, I would die happy.

But that's how he says you get started with lean is like, Combine— because you do 2 sugars and 1 cinnamon, put them in the same shaker, and then put it next to your espresso machine. So now you just shake and you don't have to go to 2 different drawers at the end of the day. And that's what Lean says is like, well, when you walk out on your factory, what bugs you? Start there. And I was like, ah, that's such a profound statement.

That's so good.

Which is— so that would be the way in to me is like fix what bugs you. If you have more of a macro viewpoint, like I tend to have, not because everything bugs me, Dude, I open up our Slack and it bugs me. Everything bugs me. Everything is just a blistering— because I'm like, I know it could be so much better. I have to tie it to our strategy. That's honestly, to me, it's like, for me, it's just like, so when you look at RL and you look at the next 36 months of RL, you're like, for me to get us above 1,000 doors and not have a churn problem, we need to be communicating every day with our owner investors, even if they don't read that. And I'm not going to do that by handwriting every email and having a pod structure. I'm gonna do it by having an AI agent that we create for every owner investor with more than 5 doors, and it's populated with maintenance requests, transcripts of calls, and move-in, move-out data. And so like, I have to tie it to a strategic focus. Like, that's how I get like started, is that mandate for change. Because if it's just like, I don't know, RL's working pretty good, and it's like, so then don't do it, dude.

Don't do it.

It's the same dude. It's just the same as SOPs. Like if you're happy answering the phone at your property management company, don't push it down. But it has to start with, I haven't been on a vacation in 5 years, so I need to start writing stuff down. I think it's the same. It's this, it's you nailed it. It's the exact same mandate for systems and processes.

My business partner and I have a phrase we like to use. Um, when we get to that breaking point about something where it's just bugging us so much that we have to take action and we just tear into something. We call it reaching DFA status, which is done effing around. So be like, I finally reached DFA status about our applicant process. It was such a mess. I just ripped the whole thing out. We're starting over. Like I rewrote the application or whatever it is. And I, I love, like, I feel that about our hiring form.

I feel that about a year ago I wrote a memo about how we need to change our hiring form and it hasn't changed yet. I'm rapidly approaching DFA.

DFA status. Yep. And it's like I can watch myself approach. DFA status on something and I'm like, all right, it's happening. Like, this can't go on the way it is.

What I would say, I want to talk about some of the other stuff you talk about because you hit a couple really big ones too, which is, and this is the big thing, this is a really big idea, but it's like somebody could start a consultancy on, on just like this one idea, I think, which is everybody's been digging, digging holes, which is the equivalent of doing property management outputs or recruitment outputs. Boats with shovels, and you have 10 people and they dig 100 cubic meters a day. You buy a new bulldozer. That is not to create 100 cubic meters of dirt a day. It's to create 10,000 because ain't no shovels. And if you don't raise the bar of your expectations concurrent with better tooling, you're never gonna harvest the gains. So in global talent recruitment, it's 2 to 3 weeks. That's how long it takes. And as soon as we started rolling out, for example, the way that we screen resumes, the First Steps AI, right? We used to have a team of 25 people and they could do 50 a day and yada, yada, yada. But as soon as we were able to do that, I was like, our goal is to present candidates in 48 hours. And they're like, well, we can't do that using shovels. And I'm like, we ain't using shovels no more, guys. And it puts pressure on the organization where your expectations around how much dirt gets moved have to raise. Because if not, they're going to go right back to the shovels and your fancy bulldozer is going to sit there unused, or they're only going to use it when the boss is watching. Oh yeah, we're using the bulldozer. And you're still moving 100 cubic meters. They're like, You know, it's still better to use the shovel. And I'm like, 10,000 a day, guys, 10,000 cubic meters of dirt a day, or else you all are fired. And then magically you start, but you have to set that bar and enforce it, or else you're never going to harvest more dirt getting moved. They're just going to move 100 meters and then they're going to find other things to do. Oh, I was polishing the shovel today and I created a new shovel storage system. And, and you're not going to capture. Right. You're not going to capture the efficiency gains.

We should buy a factory, John. It'd be so fun. Fuck that, dude.

It's too hard.

It'd be so fun to go be on the actual factory floor.

Let Josh Shultz do that shit. I know. Like he's— and he fucking gave up or he didn't give up, but he moved on. But like that to me is those utilization gains need to be driven from above or else they will never happen. They will never happen. They will literally paint the shovels. They will organize the shovels. They'll use different shovels. They'll talk about their shovel. You know, scheduling tool.

Yeah.

Um, and you're like, yo, there's a fucking bulldozer. Yeah.

And I think this— the way to get started here, as I'm thinking through this, you have to start by defining like the, the outputs and the SLA, um, that you're currently set up to deliver. So in property management, for example, like if you think big picture, what are the outputs of a property management company? Like, if it was, if it was a control system, which that's my background, what is on the output side of this machine?

Um, perfect rent collection. It's John Cypher stuff.

Perfect rent collection, no evictions.

It's dirt moved from this to this. Yeah, right. So what are the outputs of your back office team at RL?

And what's going to happen is if you take time to define the outputs and the, the SLA, and by that I mean like the time expectations of the outputs, that's where you're going to find opportunity to use a bulldozer instead of shovels. So I think about property management, it's like perfect rent collection, no evictions, no, uh, 3 weeks of vacancy a year. That could be something to look into. Um, perfect property maintenance, On-time disbursements. Disbursements, by the way, happen like 25 days after rent collection. That could be another bulldozer opportunity. Uh, and you know, you could spend a lot of time defining a high NPS, high-end, yes, rental owner statements. Um, what are all the other outputs of a property management company and how— what is the time expectation or the quantity or quality expectation of something like an owner report or describe the output? Yes. Or a replacement of a tenant or a rent collection process or whatever. Until you take time to define all those things, you're not going to see the opportunities to employ a bulldozer. So for example, in property management, like what if you could gear— so most property management companies only run disbursements once a month in, in batch, in bulk, because it's a very tedious, time-consuming process with a bunch of accounting and generates a bunch of questions and rent comes in all different times of the day. Well, what if you could tell all owners you will get your rent the same day that we get it? Yes. That is a game changer.

So now you've tied it into product innovation.

Is it?

Yeah, that, that to me is where it gets interesting. What you just said, which is using these tools natively. How can I use this as a competitive fucking sledgehammer? Which is in my marketing, it says same day disbursements and your competitors are going, They must have a team of 50 back office people, right? Exactly right.

They're reconciling every night. Like, it's crazy.

Like, so to me, we're— but, but that value then has to tie into kind of like your marketing, your customer acquisition, which is what are the things? So for me, one of the things I've been chasing is 3-day custom sources, sourcing. But the, the white whale that I've been going off at, which I— there's some strategic questions here— is I want to do unlimited hiring at Sega. Mm-hmm. Unlimited. It's not 6 a year. It's unlimited. Now there might be—

Okay, great. We're signing up for that.

But there might be some things about concurrence and stuff like that, like only a certain— But I'm like, that now becomes a competitive weapon. But I couldn't do that if I had a team of 50 people using resumes all day. And so what it does is it unlocks, hey, we can build your house in 3 days because we use bulldozers and my competitors say it's a 6-month wait to have your foundation dug.

I love the idea of unlimited hires, but only one at a time, because that perfectly aligns like all of the pain points and incentives that have been problematic. Like people take too long to review the resumes and make a decision and everything else.

It might be unlimited hires if you meet our SLA, but if you don't, like if you give us feedback on candidates within 48 hours, every time we present candidates, you don't get charged a credit. But if you make me chase you for 2 weeks and burn my labor saying, hey Peter, any comments, I'm going to charge you because But if you just give me comments and they're substantive and you get back to us, it might be like conditional unlimited is what I'm— but the point would be is where you just said it to me is the key is you're driving AI. You can either use it to make more, be more profitable, which I think is the least interesting because that's going to get competed away over time. So you could be more profitable above the industry average. Number 2, you can use it to pass along savings to your customer. Hey, we're a 2% management fee company and your margins are just as good as your competitors. Or number 3, you can use it, which is what we're doing at Sagan, to raise the expectations. Hey, we do it in 2 days. Hey, we do unlimited hire. Hey, we do. So I think you have a strategic choice, but all of that is how you get energized to go on this journey, to go through the pain of transformation, to get out of the pod structure because pod structure doesn't facilitate AI agents. Yep. So you have to have that really powerful mandate.

There's a great quote, um, about— you actually almost said it. Okay, great quote from a coach, an old business coach of mine, Dan Tocchini. He said, you need to have a vision big enough to carry you through the pain of transformation, which is almost exactly verbatim what you just said. Which is very interesting to me. Um, so quite applicable for— it's applicable across, across the board, but very much so with AI projects or global talent.

Yeah. Um, but a lot of times that's why I start our sales calls, especially with like bigger private equity firms. I'm like, your thing about this is tactical. Oh, I need bookkeepers. And I'm like, you should be thinking about this as a thematic focus for your next fund. Because if you learn how to use global talent effectively, you can buy veterinary facilities that other PE companies can't. And I say that so that if their first hire doesn't work out, they're like, ah, global talent doesn't work. I'm like, no, man, like this is a big enough vision, strategic lever that you should put some calories into this. Yeah. So I want to talk tactical. You want to talk tactical? Like very in the weeds. Okay. So if I were you right now, let's pretend you're like, okay, I want to raise the bar at RL. I want to do disbursements every day. You are correct in that, like, where I would start is I'd probably get— Seguin can get you somebody who is your— I think Michael Greenberg has used this analogy, which I like. It's like architects, GCs, day laborers. The role in AI that is irreplaceable right now that I think for small businesses, I think I'm one of the best in the world at it, is the architect role because it's meeting with the client. And having a vision for what the house can be. And if you put that wall there, it's gonna increase your costs by a million. And that right now is the rarest skillset. But you might want a GC. And a GC is somebody who you're like, yo, can you make sure that this column in Airtable gets sent in JSON to this lovable site and make sure that all the UIDs match up? The architect doesn't need to do that. The GC can, but the GC can't sit with this ambiguous unstructured thing and build a house. That solves a problem. And so you should think of yourself as the architect, and you can absolutely staff out the GC or the day laborer role for some guy Sagan finds you or somebody $10 an hour who knows N8N, and you just write him a memo and then you're like, yo, build this in N8N. The architect is the hard part right now, which is ambiguous problems, unstructured data, undefined budgets to a blueprint. Once you have a blueprint, Hand it to some guy in Argentina who's a fucking coder and he's like, yeah, dude, I got— I know how to build a blueprint.

Yeah.

So think of yourself as the architect right now, as like the AI architect, which is, hey, if you had to accelerate our disbursement process and do it every day, what would break? Well, you know, they send us their— the rent gets notified by email. Okay, so if it went straight into Airtable, Yeah. Okay. Now if it was all in Airtable, then what would slow you down? Well, I have to issue 25 checks.

Okay.

So if we could send a push notification to Stripe via— and then you just start fucking going right to them and you start solving constraints. That's what I did is you go right to the metal and you're like, if I said 3 days, they'd be like, well, we can't screen enough applicants. I'm like, all right, give me 2 weeks. I'll solve screening applicants. Well, we don't have enough interviewers. Okay, give me 2 weeks. Yeah. And you just start solving the constraints to get to like your SLA.

Yeah. And I think if, if you're— something I've noticed, you know, I've had a bunch of team members who have worked with me a long time now, and they've seen a couple cycles of me coming up with kind of a crazy idea that we're not currently doing, problem solving in exactly that way. Hey, what would happen if we did this? Well, the first thing is that would And I'm like, okay, well, I actually have a solution in mind for that. What's the next thing? Right? And they've then seen the rollout of the solution, the initial bumps, the smoothing of the bumps, and now it's just like the water we swim in. They've seen a couple cycles of me do that, of me doing that. Like, oh, we're gonna do it. We're gonna bring maintenance in-house. That's it. What are you— Ty, it's crazy.

We don't have the software.

We don't have the tech.

We don't have— or use a Notion.

Right, exactly. So now I have a little bit of banked goodwill that I can buy down for the next big project or big change or whatever. Because people are like, oh yeah, this sounds kind of weird, but I've seen this playbook before. Peter usually actually gets this stuff figured out. He's got a good intuition about what's possible. The problem is if you've burnt all your goodwill on this as the business owner, which many business owners do— I see it all the time— They come home with 15 big ideas. They try and push their team to implement them. It all gets half done, but they don't abandon the old thing.

And your team learns to ignore your new ideas because they're never really going to.

So you got to really be selective about this stuff and only take on things that you're very— not like 100% confident, but quite confident that are actually going to work. Prior to that, you should be in that play stage that we were talking about.

Yeah, it's off on the edges.

6:00 PM on a Friday, everyone's home. You're just messing around, logged into everything where you don't need to involve anyone else.

Exactly right. You don't go to your core process and start playing with it, right? You go on the edges, you build confidence. The other thing I'd say too, that I think as a leader is like, I've given this speech 1,000 times, versions of this with every member of my team, which is in your seat, it would say, I hope you all have seen the vivid vision at RL Property Management. Um, which is we want to be, you know, Columbus's largest, highest NPS-scored property manager by 2028. In order to do that, we need to push the limits on what serving our owner investor looks like. And with the way we are currently organized, we cannot get there. Therefore, I am going to be running a pilot with a few of our owner investors to experiment with what AI-generated customer service deployments look like. But you're constantly tying it in to desired end state, why what we're currently doing isn't going to get there so that they know. They're like, you're right, we could never turn around maintenance requests in 60 minutes with the way we— So I give the version of that speech about energizing towards the ultimate goal. 1,000 times because then they can see it's not Peter read a book and now has a bunch of fucking ideas.

So effective. And that is, if I could teach every leader in my company and every leader that I'm friends with how to do what you just said well, you've read it 1,000 times, but you just broke it down really clearly, which is like kind of mission, vision, right? Start with that. And then you're like, problem. And as soon as you introduce a problem, this is a classic sales technique, right? You want to reach all 20 customers a day, but you can only make 10, 10 phone calls a day. You're like, oh wow, okay, where's he going? Um, so it's like big mission vision, problem that's preventing us from getting there, and now I'm going to introduce a solution. That framework is how you roll out changes, how you introduce ideas, how you take a company in a new direction, how you implement AI strategically.

And you say that over and over and over.

Yeah, you have to repeat it. Um, and so many leaders just, they jump to step 3. They start at step 3 because they think step 1 and 2 is obvious because it's obvious to them. Yeah. And you can't do that. You can't skip that part.

I, I, I find myself doing a lot of internal sales now. Yep. Where I go to one of our pod leads who has 10 recruiters who work underneath them, and I'm like, Just so you know, we're doing this because I'm seeing that this problem is existing and I'd like your buy-in. I don't know if it's going to work, but here's— you're going to see this and here's why we're doing it. And I take my time winning over internal stakeholders. And that's what I find myself doing a lot to kind of drive this adoption and change. Because now, when somebody goes, I liked the old way we did that, and am I still going to have a job? And these people are now bought in, which is like, You know, you heard John, which is you guys are all going to have the opportunity to level up, but if you think your job is stable grading resumes, you need to either learn or go find another place where you can grade resumes all day because the pain train's coming.

It's kind of like, you know, what's the saying in politics? There's some saying about like, when you take a vote, you should already know what the votes are.

Yeah. Never ask it. It's the same in interrogation. Never ask a question you don't know the answer to.

Like when you introduce an idea in a meeting, what you want is everyone at the table nodding in agreement, because you've already talked to them about it one-on-one. Like they don't all know that you all talked to all of them, but all of a sudden everyone's just like, yeah, that's what we should do. And you're like, yeah, I know. Cause I like one-on-one sat with each of you and made sure you were bought in first. Similar type of idea.

I have a question for you because I think you and I generally speaking have done a good version of this done. I've done pretty well on this. I think you have too, which is we've built a bank account of trust with our teams. Like everybody knows like John's a little nuts, but they're just like, no, but he's led us, like, he's made good decisions, he's gotten us through the forest before, and it made my life easier. What about with somebody who has an empty bank account? Because they heard this for the first time and all of a sudden they had a stroke of insight. They're like, I'm that guy. I forwarded Twitter threads to my team. And every time I read a new nonfiction business book, we were doing KPIs and then we did OKRs and then we did EOS. And then we did— and I'm that guy, guilty as charged.

Yeah.

How do you reset and kind of start rebuilding? Because I would almost say that that is— that's actually the first step, which is you need to build back that bank account. Because if you're operating at zero and you have a bunch of people sitting in your conference room like this, like, what's the stupid idea I'm going to ignore this week? Right? Like, like, where would you— where would you— how would you rebuild that?

So I'm actually giving a talk related to this at the MX Summit, which is the property mill conference coming up in a couple of weeks in South Dakota. It's about how to— it's basically about how to gain power and influence with your peers and your team. And what I recommend in that talk, and I'll repeat here, is, well, in this specific example that you're giving, the first thing you need to do is acknowledge past sins. You need to acknowledge and admit.

That was what I was gonna say too. Yeah, I know that I've been somewhat unpredictable.

Exactly. And be specific, you know, remember I talked about this, and then, you know, and explain some of the reasoning behind why those projects didn't stick or why that you didn't proceed with them, just so people get a little closure on some of that stuff. I'm really big on closure. Like, anytime we try to do something or I ask somebody to do something, I want to know, like, what's the outcome? Like what? It's like, why not? Why? Why?

Why not? Yeah. Bless me. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I launched two software tools we didn't use. I changed one product. You just like list them out.

Like when I worked at these engineering companies, they would do this. They would come out with some big new thing or big new role or tech or whatever marketing thing. And then two months would go by and then you hear nothing about it. And I always wanted to be like, what the hell happened? Like, can I get some closure? Like, just tell me like what's going on with it. So anyway, you got to start with that. And the next thing you need to do, and I talk about this in my talk, is you have to, you have to like garner a reputation for doing what you say you're gonna do.

It's that simple.

And what I recommend is start really small. I would not start with a big new AI project. I would say something like Every Monday I'm going to give a 2-sentence update on the company in Slack and then do that for 8 weeks consistently. Did you say— yes. And then you say, you know, we're— we're going to start meeting with our leadership team, which we're not doing consistently. We're going to have a meeting once a week, Wednesdays at 12 PM. We're starting right on time. And then do that consistently for 6 weeks and follow the same agenda. Like doing what you say you're going to do, like slowly building up.

That is exactly right.

Yeah. You're not only on, you're building your team, you're training your team, but you're also like rebuilding your own confidence in your ideas and your ability to execute at the same time.

So the two things I would build on that, which is first, you don't get to keep going if you don't keep that promise. It is a pass/fail exercise in that if you don't send the three sentences on Monday, you don't keep going until you can say something. And then do it consistently to rebuild the trust of your team, then you do not get to go to the next step and say, okay, finally we can start doing AI stuff. It's like, no, no, no, this is a pass/fail exercise. The second thing I would say, which is there's nothing wrong, and you said it perfect, I think you and I's philosophy on this is very aligned, which is, hey, I'm gonna send a 3-sentence thing out on Mondays and you do it for 4 weeks and it's a bad idea or you don't wanna do it anymore, it's not useful. Guess you're allowed to change your mind, but what do you have to do? Close the loop. Yes. Hey guys, as I said, I was going to send a thing out on Mondays. It's been 4 weeks. Nobody's reading it. So I'm just going to stop doing that and we'll reexamine this. I'm thinking about maybe doing a podcast, but just want to let you guys know, right? It wasn't as useful as I hoped it would have been. And now your team's like—

I can't tell you how much confidence that gives people when they're like, okay, someone's paying attention around here. Someone's actually like Is somebody in charge?

Like, is the pattern— I mean, is the pattern as simple as the people who oftentimes found or lead companies are very kind of visionary?

It's 100%. Yeah.

And I was just thinking about that. And they're just in a meeting. They throw out a bunch of hot garbage. Some of it's formed, some of it's not. And as a survival mechanism, their team learns to be slow to the trigger so that when they then want to come with something that they're serious about, it is indistinguishable from the correct normal chaos of the way that the visionary communicates.

And that's why it's a trope, is because the type of people who start companies tend to be visionaries. And so they tend to be a little lackadaisical in the details and follow-through, a little bit of, eh, we'll figure it out, I'll prep on the way to the meeting, like that type of personality, because they can usually pull that stuff off. I've got a lot of integrator in me, so I tend to be very, you know, engineering background and all that. I'm like, okay, we're going to do things exactly the correct way. Um, and I have a friend who I talk to a lot in the property management world who's, who has really been examining this in his own life, and he's kind of like, I don't really know if he's worried that he's too visionary and not enough integrator, and is that going to prevent him from, from being successful? And kind of like this question around like, can you even really hire a great number 2 integrator type person to balance out the visionary? And you can, you have to pay a lot for it, but you can. But I also think that—

or you have to spend 9 years building one, right?

Um, but what's your take on this? Because this is a common thing. And like, what would be your advice to like a classic visionary? Is this something where they just need to kind of suck it up and figure out how to be a 10% integrator, or should they hire for it, or So I'll say two things because I think by nature, I am a visionary.

By nature. But I saw when I was running GarageXL that I was going to be limited if I just put that label on myself and said, and that's an excuse to be fucking undisciplined and not care about this. And so I said, you know, there's natural integrators, there's bad integrators, and then there's people who learn to be integrated, like who learn to get good. So I like to sell. I am a sales guy. I like doing that stuff, but I saw that it was going to limit my ability to drive companies or grow them or improve them if I was just like, oh, system stuff. Oh, I don't have. And so I was like, time to get to fucking work. Go, go learn, go study, go talk to Peter, go, go, go to work. Don't just think it's like I'm bad at math. It's like, how much have you practiced? And so I think in the same way, I think that label is like nature versus nurture. And I think I'm a great example of somebody whose nature is max sales, max visionary. But I'm like, yeah, okay. But I can read John Cypher's book and read E-Myth and read systems engineering shit because I want to not have this excuse as to why I'm going to be a fraction of my potential as a leader. So that's the first thing I'd say. So don't let that, oh, I'm a visionary. Dude, that's like saying I'm fat. Eat less, move more. I don't fucking know. Right? So that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is what I think has helped me a lot, especially at Sagan where I've leaned more into my visionary because it's kind of, I have a more mature operational team now with Bincy and Brian and a bunch of these folks.

You would say that you get to Now I'll be more of a visionary.

I've earned the right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I've earned the right to be more what's aligned with my personality, which is like expressive, energetic John, sales John. You know, I was taught this in a different career, but it was be yourself. And if that doesn't work, be somebody else. Where it's like, you get to be you as long as it's working. But if it's not working, all of a sudden you're visionary Peter. You're integrator. Just try it on like a hat and be like, what do they need? So I learned that in a different—

Yeah. It's kind of like what I tell my sales, my, my, whenever we hire a salesperson, I'm like, you can kind of do whatever you want as long as it's working great. If it's not working, I'm gonna pull the script out.

We're gonna keep reviewing the script. Be yourself. And if it doesn't work, be somebody else. So the other thing I would say that I think gets me a lot of juice with my team, and then, you know, we can wind up— the thing that gets me a lot of juice with my team is being self-aware about it. Yeah. And putting in, you know, Bincy— if I had Bincy join right now, I'd be like, Bincy, how do you feel about John's ideas? And she'd be like, they're good, but he always asks me, is now a good time? He will lead by saying this might be a terrible idea.

You don't need to ask Bincy, I'm right here. It's the same thing.

And then he'll say, until you write it down, it's not real. Yeah. And like, you put in guards because I can't prevent myself from sending Bincy Twitter threads saying, should we build a vector database? I can't, like, I know I'm supposed to not do that to her, but she also knows that she gets to ignore them until I bring it back up. And, and she knows that I'm not telling her to do that. My whole team knows that. Anya knows that. Soph knows that. Kayvon knows that. So like, I think the other thing you can do if you're really in that visionary category is A, get better at being more of an integrator. And then number 2. Be self-aware about it. Guys, I know I come out of these offsites and meetings with my coach with a whole bunch of ideas. My expectation is that unless I bring them back up, I'm just excited to share them with you. And I think they'd be really good. But I also understand you have a day job. So there's no expectations that— Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you just tell them that and they're like, oh, okay.

That helps. Yeah, it definitely does. It goes a long way. Yeah.

You know, so Self-awareness in most things goes a very long way.

Okay.

Uh, final thoughts on this, tools, topics, whatevs.

Um, tools, topics. I don't think I have anything this week. I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

Okay. Um, I will end with one, which is for those of you that are starting or growing families. I did not have this with my son, but with my twins it has become daily use, which is a Baby Brezza automated formula maker. Which for my first son, we were boiling water and doing all that stuff for formula. And this one, it is like an espresso machine where you put the bottle underneath, you press the button, and you set how many ounces you want. And with twins—

oh, that is great. That's such an obvious thing. Why, why has that not been a— I did not have an espresso maker for baby formula.

Done. Literally, you fill it with powder, you fill it with water, and then you press, make a 4-ounce bottle, and 3 seconds later it's the perfect temperature with the perfect amount, and off you go. Because I make freaking 50 bottles a day right now.

All right, I'll give a kid tip too. That's a great one. If your kids are a little bit older than babies, but your, your oldest one is, um, electric Cars for kids are a cheat code to getting a little bit of screen time or free time or whatever it is you want to do as a parent. We— and by the way, don't buy a new one. Just go get a free one off Facebook Marketplace. They're, they're like the sands of the earth, these friggin kids' electric cars.

I mean, you can't even imagine how many of them have been in the drive— the one that they get in.

Yeah, the one they get in and drive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. And like, you may remember these from when we were kids, John. I never had one, but if your friends had one and the battery would last for like 6 minutes. You remember that?

Yeah. These are great now.

These new ones, they're way better. The motor technology has gotten better. The battery technology has gotten better.

Does yours have a control? Ours has a control so I can drive him in it. Oh no, he can drive himself and I can also drive him because when he was a little bit younger, he couldn't really steer for sure.

That's cool. So yeah, go pull one off the side of a road. Chances are it just needs a new battery or you might need to open it up and tighten up some of the connections like I did. And they're good for hours of fun every day, and it's just, it's a blast.

So, love it.

All right.