PM Process Workshop: New Client Onboarding with Benjamin Serven

All right. We will give about 1 to 2 minutes here to let folks jump on. How you doing today, Ben?

Not half bad. Not half bad. I actually got in a workout this morning, so I feel pretty decent. And, and I actually just got back from a haircut like 20 minutes ago.

Weird. We had like the same day.

This is getting a little bit weird now. That's crazy. You're trying to get people to come live next to you, but I don't know, it's a few too many coincidences.

Are you one of those like super early morning workout guys? Like how early?

Uh, starting to be, um, I get up at 4:45 and I try to be in the gym by 5:15.

Oh wow. Yeah, that is early.

Yeah. It's, uh, to me that works super well. And, um, that allows me to get the majority of the workout done and to eat breakfast before my kids are up, which for me is ideal because then I can actually I can be present, engaged, you know, read to them, talk to them, whatever we're doing in the morning. So yeah, that's what I try to do.

Doesn't always work, but I'm, I'm 60 minutes behind you. So on Thursday mornings is my early morning workout day and my workout starts at 6. I'm back by 7. By then kids are up having breakfast and I help get 'em out the door. But similar goals.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, mornings can be, uh, can be tough. When you have small children.

Yeah, it's crazy. And anyone who doesn't have a car seat in the back of their car, they can take their personal productivity advice and shove it somewhere else.

Oh my gosh. Yes.

I'm sorry, but it is really relevant.

I have zero voice in this conversation.

So congrats on getting after it.

Yeah, yeah. I'm feeling good. Yeah, same to you, man. Two dads got some stuff done today. Yep.

All right, so, uh, let's kick it off. So folks, you are on the kind of season finale of my little mini workshop series on process building. So my goal with this series, if you've seen some of the other episodes, we each episode we tackle one core process that property managers deal with all the time. And I walk through that whole process and try to build it for somebody in real time, live on this hour-long webinar. The goal is to show other folks how I think about process and also demonstrate how it doesn't need to be complicated, and you can kind of jump in and start messing around and get something very useful very quickly. Uh, that's something I think intimidates a lot of people about trying to document and automate their processes. It feels like this big scary thing that they don't even know where to start. My goal is to sort of demystify that and show you that it's really a pretty straightforward thing. And the software, although it can be used to do a lot of really cool, clever, powerful things, you can also use it in a really, really simple way that still gets you a ton of value and a ton of mileage. So that's what we've been doing over the past 4 to 5 months or so. We've been doing one a month. And today I am joined by a special guest, Ben Servin of Black Sheep Global. Ben, why don't you just share a little bit about your background and what you're up to today?

Absolutely. So I spent 5 years or so working in the space of prop tech implementation. I had the privilege of working at LeadSimple for a couple of years, had a really cool experience there, moved on to do some, some other things and ended up starting Black Sheep Global about 3 years ago now. So we are a team of implementers. We help you actually cross the finish line. That's really what our goal is. What we've observed is there's a lot of great technology that's in this property management space, but implementation of those pieces of technology can be really challenging. And that's how Black Sheep Global came to be, to really solve that problem. So we work with about 220 or so different PM businesses across the country, even a few in Canada. And, um, companies that are little, companies that are big, and, uh, we've kind of seen a lot of different things. So trying to, um, you know, help people get a really strong handle on what it looks like to have efficient, healthy businesses that, um, are run through, uh, great software solutions.

Love it. And yeah, Ben, I knew you when you worked at LeadSimple, and, um, your process chops are second to none. I mean, you know that product like the back of your hand. You know how property managers think about process and how they can effectively use processes. You know about all the backend automations and tie-ins with Zapier. So yeah, I mean, you're definitely got your process chops. No, no doubt about that. Okay, so let me just take a minute and let me pull up my little kind of mini agenda that I use for these calls. So I talked about how my goal, you know, I want property managers to have more success with process. That's sort of like a fundamental mission of mine. I've got a lot of other things going on, but my background is systems engineering. I worked as a control systems engineer for 5 years right out of college. I have a degree in electrical engineering. And so my whole outlook on the world is shaped by control systems. And so when I started in property management, I realized that a property management company is nothing but a big control system for properties. You've got these inputs coming in in the form of tenant communications, owner communications, issues going on at the property, rent, and then you've got outputs, right? You, you can send people to the property, you can send emails, you can make phone calls and, and sort of the machine in the middle there, the black box is your management company. And if you can set it up right, if you can hook it up right, like the circuits kind of, then everything's going to run awesome. And so I brought that way of thinking to the founding of RL Property Management, and I had no background in property management prior to that. I didn't have any real estate or property management experience. And so I ended up kind of reinventing the wheel in a lot of situations, a lot of unnecessary work, but in other ways, because I wasn't sort of tied down by all that sort of, this is the way we do things. I was able to come up with some pretty fresh and innovative ways of dealing with residential rentals. Um, a lot of that has since become commonplace, like here we are talking about process, but I was running my company with these core processes in a documented way long before LeadSimple even came out with our process product, let alone the other folks that have come out since then. In fact, way back then I was, I eventually stumbled on a Process Street and I know some folks still use and love Process Street. It's a great product. And if you're on Process Street, you're going to be able to use a lot of what we talk about today, even within that product. I'm going to be using LeadSimple to sort of demo the way I think through this, but I'm going to try and keep my advice and my commentary general enough that you can take and use it no matter what platform you're using. So, this idea of like the property management company as a control system for properties, it really led me to think about, okay, what are the core kind of programs that are running at a property management company? And I think of these as our core processes. And for me, these are like move-in, move-out, lease renewal, new owner, new client, de-management, and maybe like eviction. There's a couple others in there, but those are really the main ones that you're cycling through continuously, and each of which is fairly long and involved. You may have a collections or delinquency process in there as well, depending on sort of how complicated your state makes that. In Ohio, it's actually really straightforward. So Ben, how is that— like, how do you think about process these days, having done— so I'm speaking kind of from an operator perspective, but you're speaking from a consultant, somebody who's worked with many, many, many operators and seen it done 6 ways from Sunday and has tried a million different ways yourself.

What—

how do you think these days about process at a property management company?

Yeah, it's a great question. The way that I think about it is a good process is one that people will use. And so in order for that to be actually helpful or true or a meetable goal, you really have to adjust your expectations so that your process is at the level of your team. And I think that's why it's really key to have some of these probing conversations when you're embarking on this journey of being more process-oriented, to understand where your team is at with technology, where your team is at with their adaptability to change, because adding process into the mix in a formalized kind of way is really an exercise in change management. And And if you approach this without some caution and wisdom, it's gonna blow up in your face. And the value of the processes that you could have just by doing a little bit of upfront planning can go right out the window. So I think it's really important to A, be intentional, and B, involve your team as much as possible. And I think processes, like I said, are incredibly powerful, unless your team is really bought into making this change and being more process-oriented as a company, it's really going to be quite challenging. The way I talk to my clients about it is that you're really going from your current culture to a new and different culture, a new and improved culture, but that culture is very process and system-oriented, and it's a mindset change for the whole company, not just the owner.

Yeah, it's a big challenge. And, you know, you and I both know, Ben, folks who have tried to roll out some type of process software and bounced off it and kind of went back to the way they were doing things. And I'm talking about companies as small as 50 doors and companies as big as 5,000 or more doors.

Oh yeah.

You know, each having their own unique challenges here. The thing that I think makes this exceptionally difficult. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this series to sort of unpack it a bit is, you know, like, let's talk about a different space within property management. Let's talk about like who you use for self-showings, whether it's ShowMojo or Rently or Tenant Turner or RentEngine, or there's a bunch of these companies. If you decide that you want to switch out one of those vendors, it's actually pretty straightforward. You just kind of sign up with a new group, they get you your logins, they ask you a few questions, they maybe you order some lockboxes, you swap out the schedules and your listings, you're kind of good to go. You already have a motion in place for leasing units and you may even already be familiar, very familiar with one of their competitors. And so you understand what you're signing up for. When you try and sign up with a company like LeadSimple or others who provide these process solutions, What you're coming from is radically different. Um, you may not have your processes documented at all. And so in order to sign up for LeadSimple or another software like Process Street or something, you are actually trying to do two things at once, both of which are brand new for you. You're trying to document your processes, which you've probably never done or may have done in a very limited way. And then you're trying to move them onto a digital. Workflow software that you've never used before and you've never used anything like it before. So no wonder folks have trouble here. That's a lot to ask of a small or large company. And so what we're going to do today is try and help and we're going to do it for free. So how great is that? Let's, let's see if we can help some people today. Yeah. So what we're going to be talking about today is the new property/new client process. And, uh, one of the things I learned from LeadSimple when I first, um, started chatting with them about process, which was a great insight prior to working with LeadSimple, we had those processes in one. In other words, we had a single new property, new owner process in Process Street. Uh, and LeadSimple really recommended that those be in two separate processes. And after I thought about that, I ended up really liking it. Um, Ben, what are you seeing these days? Is that still the conventional wisdom, is to have these as two separate processes?

Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that because we've actually taken it, I think, a little bit of a level beyond that. Um, for people who are super nerds, um, we actually divide these now into three processes. Um, and we have an owner onboarding process, a property onboarding process, and then we also have a unit onboarding process.

Oh, you're getting serious.

And we're We're trying to really get down to the mat and recognize that the level of detail that's required when you're dealing with particularly multifamily units gets way more intensive at the multifamily level. It multiplies very quickly just by adding a few additional units, and you have to consider things like common areas and also shared access points and all sorts of fun things. Generally, we're seeing, yes, owner and property is still the, the best way to break things down. But when you have a reasonable portion of your portfolio that's also multifamily, especially if you are wanting to go that direction, we're expecting that in the future, then that's something to think about too. We always start with owner and property because thankfully unit onboarding is typically relatively derivative from property onboarding., but with the way that information is stored in LeadSimple and different custom fields, the way those fields are associated with one another, it is important to differentiate property versus unit and make sure your data is being stored correctly as well.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I, I feel like that would get cumbersome if you're onboarding like a 50-unit property though.

I mean, yes, yeah, it absolutely does. And this is why we, we limit it, right? So we'd say, okay, If you're handling small multifamily, say up to, let's call it 4 units, all right, kind of a classic larger small multifamily, then it makes sense for this process when you're going to have kind of a one-to-one relationship with, say, an investor client who's got a small portfolio. But when you're bringing on a legitimate multifamily property with 50 or 100 or 200 units, the expectation there is that the owner of that company is looking at that as a business rather than, well, here's some properties that I happen to own. And again, the assumption here— and it is a big assumption because it's not always true— but the assumption is that that company is looking at their properties in a more systematic way and they're going to have data that will be more accessible than it would be for a smaller multifamily.

Okay, got it. All right. So without further ado, let's bring up our volunteer. So the way we run these workshops is I bring up a volunteer on stage and then we're going to build build him or her a process that ideally they can walk away from today's session and actually take and use in their property management company. And in the process, we're going to talk through, you and I, Ben, about how and why we're building it the way that we are. So, uh, Jared, why don't you come up on stage and introduce yourself? Just maybe give us like a 1 to 2 minute backstory on, uh, on who you are and what you're up to today.

All right, so my name is Jared. I am the assistant property manager at Swansboro Port Realty. On the east coast of North Carolina. Um, I started working here about a year ago. Um, my parents have owned the company for about 15 years, and I am essentially joining to increase the amount of properties. Um, you know, start some processes and kind of help them retire.

Yeah.

Um, And that's, that's kind of why they brought me on. You know, instead of selling the business, they were looking for a succession, a succession plan with their kids.

So cool.

That's kind of why I'm here. I enjoyed, you know, working in commercial banking before this and then, and then joined my parents.

Got it. And just to give us a sense of scale, if you're comfortable sharing, like about how many doors under management right now?

Yeah.

So we manage about 165 doors right now. They're predominantly single family.

Yep.

And I mean, we do have like some quadplexes in there, but the majority of them are single family.

And when you— and what— so what we're going to be talking about today is like onboarding, owner and property onboarding. So when you get a new client, very exciting, right? They sign the PMA.

Great.

You know, it's a big deal. Um, what do you do and do you, do you have like, and I, you sent me something which we're gonna look at, but just share with the audience, like, do you have like a printed out checklist? Do you have a Google Doc that you follow? Like how do you know what to actually do once the PMA is signed?

Um, so we don't, we don't really have anything that's written down. I mean, it's kind of, it's really in the office, it's me, my mom, my dad.

So you kind of, you kind of just know what to do.

Yeah, exactly. We pretty, pretty much they taught me what I'm supposed to be doing to do it. Um, and I mean, I wrote down a couple things like when we bring on or we get a call from a new owner, you know, I— right now we don't have like a CRM for property management owners or leads, so I'll create a new owner in AppFolio, write down their contact information, and then reach out to them that way. I'll send them, you know, the PMAs through AppFolio PDF templates. And that's pretty much, you know, once we get that, we'll do walkthroughs of the property before then and, you know, yeah, CMA and stuff like that.

Okay, great. And that's pretty typical. So And what I'm going to do now is share my screen. And the first thing we're going to look at here is this is what you sent prior to the, um, the workshop today. This is sort of a, uh, quick and dirty version of an onboarding checklist that you guys follow. And we'll use this as we kind of build out the process just as a sort of a reference doc. And, um, what I'll do now is I'll share my other screen. I'll share my browser and we're just going to get started. Like, let's, let's do this. Let's build you a process. And, um, we'll hope to keep this sort of general enough. So even if you're not using LeadSimple, you still get some value out of it. So what I'm going to do is click add a process and we're going to click new custom process. Now I want to get your opinion, Ben. Should we tackle new owner or new property? On today's, today's live?

Well, I think we should focus on new owner. There's, you know, even just looking at the notes Jared provided there, I think it's important to delineate that we've got a sales process or a sales workflow, and then there's also an onboarding process or workflow, and those really are two separate things. So I think that'd be a great spot to focus, and hopefully Jared can take that see some value from that right away.

Perfect. So we don't necessarily want to tie this to a specific property, do we, Ben?

No, we wouldn't. This field that you're highlighting here, this would be a merge field. So LeadSimple, if we left it here, would automatically populate this with the property in the future. So since this is really just an example, it's really not necessary.

Perfect. So we will click Save. And when we're done today, I can make this process shareable. So anyone who wants, including Jared himself, will be able to go in. Um, we'll make this available for anyone who wants to go and grab it. Okay. So I'm just going to quickly remove, um, the other folks at my company. Um, don't email them to just kind of make sure that no one accidentally gets notified if we end up creating like a little demonstration process here. So, we'll get everyone out of here except for me. And then we can— Ben, anything you would want to change in kind of all of these settings before we just jump into like building?

I just jump into the building. What I find that is most helpful when we're building a process from scratch is to kind of draw the skeleton first and then fill in the details later. So, I actually like to start in these sidebars and go through kind of my overview. I'd even start there and say, you know, what's the purpose of this process? What are we trying to accomplish? And just say, all right, you know, this is a process to onboard a new owner. And what I'd be looking for in this process is to make sure that this owner has an amazing experience. The owner onboarding process is really all about making sure that the owner gets taken care of, right? We wanna make sure we address owner-specific needs. But it's also important to give them an amazing experience because this is the opportunity for them to have major regret, right? If they sign that dotted line and then, you know, a week later, they're like, I don't think that was a good idea. We really want to pour on the juice to make them feel, wow, this was an amazing choice. I'm so glad that I chose to work with this property management company.

Cool. Under General, We're going to want to add a contact role, although this is always like an interesting, like, chicken and the egg issue where it's not in the software yet. So what do you do here?

So what I usually do is I think about who's responsible for this relationship at this point in the process and, or who are the multiple relationships that are involved here, right? Because we've got our business development person who has been involved from the beginning of the relationship, but at this point we want to be handing off this relationship. This relationship should go from our BDM to now probably a property manager. Now don't worry if you're a company that doesn't have all the people in all these roles, but when we're thinking about how we organize this, there's different responsibilities that go to different roles in the organization. So I would have a BDM and then a property manager, and those would be my two internal contacts. External contacts are really just going to be my new owners. And side note there, uh, Peter, you'd want to add your BDM and property manager under the user roles and assignment section. So sorry, I should correct you a little better there. Okay.

Um, yep. So yeah, we don't actually have I don't really want to add these in my system though.

So all good.

Let's start, let's actually start building. Uh, and then I'll, I'll sometimes we'll jump through these other sidebar items as needed. Um, so just to briefly explain sort of how LeadSimple thinks about process and actually how I think about it too. Um, these big color bars here are called stages and a stage is a major milestone in the completion of a process. You should really just memorize that sentence. A stage is a major milestone in the completion of a process, and they have different categories of stages. Most of the stages are gonna be under this active stages here. Um, completed is obviously once you're done onboarding. Um, backlog, we don't, I don't actually use it all that much. And then canceled would be like if they decided not to sign on halfway through, you could create a canceled stage, like backed out, you know, decided not to sign up with us after all. You know, we could call this like completed onboarding. Um, what do you think about backlog? You use that much, Ben?

For this process? No, I don't really find it's necessary. The only scenario where I've seen it be helpful is if you have an owner who is signing a management agreement with the intention of having you manage the property at a later point. But in that case, that backlog stage wouldn't belong in this process. It would belong in your property onboarding process. So there's really not a big use for it here.

Yep. So Jared, when you are onboarding a new owner, how, like, in your mind, are there like sort of major stages that they move through? Like, I'm thinking, you know, kind of like just signed the PMA and there's like some initial work and then maybe there's like sort of a middle stage where you're maybe waiting on getting some information from them. And then there could be another stage. It's like getting everything into the system. Like, how do you guys think about that at your company?

Yeah.

So for onboarding, you know, it's the first, like, PMA is obviously that's one of the biggest stages. From there, you know, we're sending out their W-9 and a general property information sheet to get filled out. Which just has like, you know, what will your pet policy be? You know, stuff, stuff like that. Information, information about utilities, that type of stuff.

Okay.

You know what date that they're looking to start marketing it. We have in this area, it's a lot of military families. And so they are looking to start getting the place rented like a week or so after they move out. And so sometimes the homeowner will still be living in the property while, while we're marketing it. But that, that's— I mean, listing photos, that type of stuff.

Yeah. Okay. So and what I like to sort of point out here is like As you were building process for your company, don't get too tied up about the specific language or the specific stages. Um, if you're kind of an analytical person like I am, you may sort of get stuck here. You're like, I need to get the exact right stages and the right names in the right order. This is inevitably going to change as we start to build it out. And that's completely fine. Um, especially because right now we're not setting up any automations. We're not setting up any Zaps. And so, there can be issues if you change the names of things once that all of that is automation and is running and everything. But right now, this is just kind of fun. This is— this should be light and easy, and we're just going to start messing around. So, any final thoughts before we jump into this initial stage, Ben?

No, I think the main— the main thought I'd share would be for this process, the way I think about it is it really does need to be focused on the owner specifically. So obviously there's going to be some property-related tasks like marketing the property, you know, getting access, making sure we know all the serial numbers for the microwave or whatever other details you want to get. But those are really property-specific, right? So this owner onboarding process, when we go back to that purpose, right, which is the owner has an amazing experience and we get all the owner-specific data, I think it can be relatively simple when we break it down into kind of data gathering and the experience portion, as the reality is the data gathering goes pretty dang quickly so long as you are maintaining contact with that owner.

Oh, you think that goes quickly, do you?

Ah, well, I don't know about that. Let's see, this is— I'm glad you mentioned this because I think there is low-hanging fruit here related to where owner data and property data is conflated. And property data, I think, is a lot harder to get.

You're right. You're right.

You're right. Yeah. But owner data, like the, the, the main things that I think of in this stage of the process are ACH form, right? How do we get paid? W-9, let's make sure the tax man's happy. And that's really about it. Maybe a handoff to the person who's going to be taking care of this relationship into the future. But owner onboarding doesn't have to be super duper complex. Property onboarding definitely has a lot of depth to it though.

Yeah. Okay, so let's jump into this getting client info/docs stage. So what are the specific client information and documents, Jared, just briefly, that you look to receive?

Yeah.

So we're needing their, you know, phone numbers for, you know, both, you know, whoever owns the property and emails, address their new address if they know what it's going to be yet. Sometimes some of our homeowners, you know, they don't know what their new address is going to be. Trying to think of anything else for, for just their information. I think that's pretty much it.

Okay. Jared, do you guys do anything around verifying property ownership?

For verifying— I mean, we, every time we are talking to a new owner, we are looking up their, their address on the GIS and to ensure that they are the property owner.

Got it.

Okay. Any other— how about like, I think you mentioned W-9, didn't you, Jared? Yes, I did. Okay.

And, and sometimes we'll have owners that are deciding to put it in LLCs after we already send them the PMA and stuff like that.

Oh yeah, we charge a fee for that. We have an entity change fee that we charge for that.

It's a good idea.

Yeah, because it's a lot of work and we tell them about that up front. Like, hey, if you're going to change, if you're going to switch out the entity after you start with us, I think we charge like $250. That's pretty significant. Okay. What about like an ACH form? What about— do you do an ACH form?

So we, you know, we don't have an ACH form for them because They are able to add their bank information on AppFolio. Sure. And so I'll— so actually, I do have a letter that I can send to owners with steps on how to update their banking information.

Okay.

We'll probably do that later. That'll be like after they're in AppFolio, right? Yes, sir. And how about this might be related to the property, but like a copy of their Insurance showing you've been added as additionally insured. Yes, sir. Ben, what do you think? Does that go here? Does that go on the property?

Yeah, I do that on a property level. I think, um, it really is truly related to the property. And if you think about it, it's kind of maybe a weird scenario, but it is possible that you could be onboarding more than one property. You have different insurers, right? So we'd want to make sure that question was addressed for each property because otherwise that would turn into a liability issue for you. Cool.

Well, we will, uh, this looks good for now, you know, and the nice thing here, Jared, if you think of something after the fact, either later through this conversation or, you know, down the road, like, oh yeah, we, you know, we do actually have to, we always get this one document that our insurance company makes us get for new owners or whatever. You can just add it right here. It's very easy. Um, and what I'll do is I'll set this up to automatically go to the next stage as soon as these two items are completed. So let's move into this, what we're calling the working stage, and we can maybe think of a better name for that. But once you have all the documents that you need from the owner, what are the next steps in onboarding an owner, not necessarily a specific property that you guys are doing there?

So I assume this is probably after we've already gotten the PMA and all that as well.

So you're probably like, you'll need to set them up in AppFolio, right?

Yes, sir.

Yeah. Yeah. Set up the—

And typically by this point that's already been done, you know, because we don't actually have a property management owner CRM at the moment. And so I would have done this a while. I would have set them up a while ago.

When do you do that, though? What triggers you to do that?

I mean, a lot of the times because we don't have a CRM, I will do it when we get the lead because they'll typically either call in asking for us as a property management company or they'll be a referral from another one of our investor clients.

Just when they're a lead, like before they even sign a PMA or anything.

Yeah, sometimes we will. And then because we don't have a CRM for them yet, or I'll write down their contact information Um, but yeah, sometimes a lot, a lot of the times I will, I'll just create them.

Yeah. So first I, I can't really go on without recommending that you sign up for the LeadSimple CRM product, uh, which is fantastic and is exactly built for what you're talking about. Um, and it's a great way to get your feet wet with LeadSimple, with LeadSimple, if you're not ready to like fully commit to their process product. Uh, and, and, and not for nothing, but this show is hosted by, uh, LeadSimple. So shout out to them. Um, okay. Let's just pretend that you didn't do it for some reason, because I want to capture this because I think it's important. So, and you can just check it off if you already did it, right? So set up the owner in AppFolio. Um, and do you, do you want, do you do something like schedule a kickoff call with the owner? Kickoff call for just like, you know, you get the signed PMA over email. Great. You email them back like, hey, we're going to need these documents. And then do you, do you like call the owner and say, hey, thanks for signing the PMA, here's what to expect, you know, working with our company? Do you have like a kickoff call or Zoom of any kind?

Um, no, not at the moment. We are— we've typically—

because— all right, you do now, because I think that's important. Schedule kickoff call with new client.

Um, okay, well, because typically we've talked to them for I mean, well over a couple hours at this point.

Yeah, but that's different. That's like the sales process. I do think it's important that once they've signed on, you sort of— because, you know, they could have chose somebody else, right? But they didn't. So you call them up, you get them all hyped. Oh, congratulations. I'm so excited to get you guys going. We're going to get your property making money for you. We're going to be taking great care of you. Do you have any questions about some of the things I was asking you for? Do you know? Because listen, these owners are worried, right? They don't know.

They're—

let me tell you, because you know this, Jared, the minute they sign that PMA, what, what is going through their mind?

They're, they're wondering if they made the right choice. That is, that's definitely—

yes. And they're wanting to know when the F is my property going to get listed? Yeah. Like a clock is already clicking in their mind. And so you need to get on and reassure them, hey, we're on this. Here's what we need from you to get started. We're going to get your property listed as soon as possible, etc., etc. Okay. So what else? So go ahead.

Yep.

So I guess that one of the next steps would be getting keys from them.

Yeah.

Well, that's really to the property though. Ben's going to smack my hands if I start typing that.

I know I've got my Switch out here. I'm like, I think one of the next tasks that could come, I think in this whole conversation of encouraging the owner and helping them to kind of reaffirm their choice, the thing to do is to kind of make things feel safe. And one of the best ways that you can do that is by setting expectations, right? By telling them clearly, here's what's about to happen, right? Here's what we're going to be doing for you. So I think a really great follow-up on that conversation is that you are sending them a follow-up email that says, okay, you know, we just had our kickoff call, we're so excited to work with you, here's what's going to be happening next. And you can have, you know, maybe not an exact timeline, but here are the things that happen as we're going to be onboarding a— your new property. And we can customize this at some level to this specific person, but you want to have some general guidelines here. We're going to be inspecting the property if it hasn't happened already. We're going to be cleaning the property. We're going to be doing a make ready, maybe. We're going to be starting our process of marketing the property, and here's how that works. So much of this, of any change, anytime we're talking about change in a team or change for anyone, there's fear. The clients are, made a poor choice. So we can mitigate that fear by eliminating it and showing there's nothing to fear. We are the experts. Here is our process. It's so easy and simple. You don't have to do a thing. We're just taking care of everything for you. And that's a great way to reassure the owner that they made the right choice. And also, that shouldn't happen just one time, right? We want to continue to reassure them. Especially while that property is vacant, right? We want to encourage them, you know, this is a tough market, but we are on the hunt. We are working for you to find the right tenant for your property who's going to take great care of it and pay the best rent. You know, whatever, whatever we can add in here. This flavor should vary based on you and how you approach property management, but the goal here is to really ensure that they trust you and they know that you are going to take care of them and provide them the professional service that they're expecting from you.

Yeah. So I just did a little demo here and, uh, this is an email template. And so what will happen is once I hit save and we select this, you can literally just click this, Jared, make any changes that are needed and hit send. And once you're like super comfortable with how that's all running, you can even click this lightning bolt, which would make it all happen automatically as soon as these other two items were completed. Or you can set a delay or whatever you want to do.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Yep. All right. So what else in this stage, guys? What else do we want to think about or add for steps or to-dos or calls or maybe even like some automations?

So there's a couple things that I'd throw up, but I don't want to dominate the microphone because I've got Billions of ideas.

What do you think, Jared? Anything else come to mind?

I was going to let the professional, the consultant, tell me what to do.

Do you guys, Jared, do you do any kind of a— do you send them any kind of a sort of new client gift? Or even if we back out a little bit and what we actually do And we'll come back to that working stage, but on this completed stage, we actually have a to-do item that kicks off. Uh, we have like a 120-day check-in call that we do. And so we set this to be 120 days. Um, basically after the previous step, which is just entering this stage and this gets assigned to somebody at our company. Um, that's different than the person that onboarded them. A higher level person, and that person will— this little task will pop up in their LeadSimple 3, 4 months after onboarding, and they'll give the owner a call and say, hey, how's everything going? Um, do you have any issues? Do you have any concerns? Do you have any questions? How was your onboarding experience? And it's a great way to just sort of close the loop and get feedback on this whole process. That's so that you can go back and make improvements. Like if you're consistently hearing from people that, well, it was great talking to the sales guy. But then as soon as I signed the PMA, I didn't hear anything for a week and I got really nervous. You know that you can use that to inform, um, your process. And Jared, I know right now, like given your size, you're not onboarding like tons and tons of new owners every month, but as you scale up and as you start to, um, get your sales and marketing flywheel spinning, this stuff starts to become really important. Like, cause you're gonna have so many clients onboarding and you're gonna have team members working for you and. Making sure that all this stuff is happening consistently is going to become very, very important.

Yeah.

So I guess another step that we could add in here is I will let them know once we've got it listed on the market with what we've listed it for, and I'll let them know that it is— we are marketing it now. And then once we receive a signed lease, I'll let them know the the lease date. I'll send them a text and email. We do share the leases with them, but I'll send them like a text or call or something like that and, and let them know, hey, it's been rented on this date at this price.

Yeah.

So there's a couple other processes that I would put some of those under. And I really like this graphic. I show this every time we do a workshop. This graphic that LeadSimple put together is a great way of showing how I think about processes and how to break them up. You mentioned a couple of different things in there. There's a marketing process that every new property needs to go through to get it listed and, you know, listed for rent on the market. And that actually is a separate process from either the owner onboarding or the property onboarding, because if you think about it, not every property that you onboard needs to be marketed because some of them are going to be vacant and there's going to be marketing needed for properties that you're already under management. So you don't necessarily want to tie that in with the onboarding process. So we would actually do a separate process for marketing. Nice thing about LeadSimple and some of these other softwares is you can, you can kick off a process from another process. And so they all kind of flow together really nicely. So that's, that's how I would think about where we would put that step because that is a really important step of notifying the owner that, hey, your property's listed. That's a big deal. We would have that in our marketing. Well, we do have that in our marketing process. Okay, I need to mention, by the way, folks, if you're watching this, I run a paid private community for property managers called Crane. And one of the things that we do inside Crane is we share LeadSimple templates with each other. So it's kind of like a mastermind where everyone's working together to get better and better and Some of the best ideas I've had of how to improve my own processes have come from other CRANE members. We only open up applications for new members twice a year, and the application window opens tomorrow. So you're lucky. If you're interested, go to joincrane.co. I'll, I'll drop that in the chat. And, uh, we'd love to have you inside CRANE where we, we really get into detail about processes. There's an online and offline component to CRANE where you can mastermind either through an online community, we use Circle. And then we have offline meetups that we do as well. So we'd love to see you in there. So that's my little 10-second ad for today. Um, okay, Ben, what, give me some of your brilliant ideas that you were, you were kind of holding back on.

All right, let's do it. I'm going to turn on the fire hose here. Okay. So idea number 1, um, it's important that we separate processes. And we talked about that just a moment ago with the reference to the marketing process. What we're trying to do is capture the functions of the business in their own specific processes. So as you referenced earlier in the call, we also have this option to use a process trigger, right, where we can create a sub or child process on the parent process, which in this case would be our property onboarding process. Now there is some level of conditional logic that can go into this because you ask the question, you know, how many properties is this owner going to be onboarding? And maybe the owner is going to be giving you 5 properties at once, Yay, right? That's a good day. But then we need to start 5 property onboardings, not just 1, because each of the properties needs to be onboarded individually. So that's something I would add in here into one of the next parts of the stage. The other thing that I would work on here would be the relationship, right? We talked about how this part of the processes is about taking care of the owner itself and getting all the owner-specific information. But also making sure the owner has an amazing experience. And I actually like to create a separate process all for owner experience that would also be a process of this. And again, I'll throw you a conditional logic idea here. In some cases, that's really helpful. I think it's really important to give as many owners as possible the kid glove, best in class, all the, all the good feeling kind of process. Where we are sending them messages on a weekly basis to say, hey, you know, here's what's going on with your property, or sending them gifts, or here's a book that we recommend about investing in real estate, or here's a resource where our CEO spoke on this podcast, whatever we want to send them to stay top of mind, right? That first 100 days of our relationship is absolutely crucial that we nail that relationship and that client loves you. So that's a really important piece that, that I would add in there. Now I've lost my train of thought while I went on a little rant there, but there's so many different cool things. All right, it came back to me. Conditional logic. When we bring in owners, right, it's important to think about the owners and who they are and what they care about, right? We want to know how your client is thinking and then you can serve them better. So if you think about your typical client, let's say it's your mom-and-pop investor with maybe 1 to 5 houses. They're great. Those are the people who need a lot of reassurance. They want to make sure that you're going to take care of them. This is their retirement. These are their assets. They really care a lot about working with great people. So we want to make sure they know you are great people. However, there are other clients. There are people who will show up when you have, let's say, 20 doors or 50 doors or 100 doors or 500 doors. And again, we're going to celebrate and be very excited, but that client doesn't probably care quite as much about all the good vibes. They're really just looking for someone to take this mess that they have and to handle it. So in that case, your all the good feelings process probably is less important. Maybe you want to send them down a different path of we are the professionals and here is why we rock and why we crush all the rest of the competition. Less of the, hey, we're wonderful people and here's all the cool things that we do. And why you're gonna love working with our team. So understanding where your clients are coming from and trying to think the way that they think and understand how they are feeling through this process is incredibly important. So I would encourage you to think, for anyone, to think about who your clients are and to try to customize your processes somewhat. You don't have to go too crazy on this. I can go down major rabbit trails on all of the details of what this can look like, but you don't wanna go too crazy 'cause then you're just kind of building process for the sake of process. But thinking about your client experience regardless of who you service is really, really important. And putting some, some thoughtful time into what that looks like would be highly encouraged.

Okay. I was able to build out some of what you were talking about here, Ben. I added a couple custom fields. If I can find everything I built. Yeah. So I, you had a couple good ideas there at the beginning that I wanted to capture and use it to demonstrate the way custom fields work. Sure. So you can set up process level custom fields in LeadSimple, uh, which are basically just editable data types that are specific to the process. So I created one called number of properties we're onboarding and another one called owner type. And then under the stages and workflows, I just created some steps where we're gonna update that, like right off. Right off the rip here. So you're going to be prompted, how many properties is this owner onboarding? Update in the step instructions. And then you would just edit this when you run the process. Actually, I can probably show, show that.

Um, let's try it.

So if we run this process like in, in test mode here, The first task it's asking us is how many properties is this owner onboarding? If I click this instructions thing, I can edit this number. Let's pretend they're onboarding 5 properties. And now we can build conditional logic that can, like Ben was saying, like we can kick off 5 property onboarding processes. I think that's what you're getting at, right, Ben?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we could kick off. Now that we know that we can kick off 5 property onboarding processes tied to this owner automatically. And you know, if we check off this task as being completed, the next task is going to pop up. What type of owner is this? We'll edit the instructions. We'll say they are an experienced investor. And we could also set up some conditional logic where depending on what type of owner they are,, it may trigger different parts and pieces of their, their owner onboarding, either more or less phone calls and emails to reassure them. Um, just, you know, you can set all that up again with conditional logic. So just to demonstrate what the conditional logic would look like, um, under the working stage, like we could add a step here that's like call owner They're probably nervous by now. And you could make this conditional where if the owner type is, uh, you know, newbie or whatever, you know, you could, you can define, um, am I doing this right?

Uh, so I think for your custom field, you did a text field versus a multiple choice.

Oh, any value. Okay. So we would fix that, but you get the idea, right? And then what will happen is this specific step will only show up for that owner type, if that makes sense. I hope, I hope that makes sense. Um, Ben, how would you do the thing where you like kick off multiple processes depending on the number that they selected?

Yeah. So if you hit a create process task. Right now I'll show you exactly how it would work. Let me just add it to the workflow here. So we're on the right-hand side. There you go. Okay, and go over to our little conditional logic tree over here at Blacksheep Global. We like to call this the Tower of Truth or the Tower of Logic. Let's see, and then in the field, let's choose our number of properties. Perfect. And then let's choose is between for this example. Okay, and what we would do here is we'd actually create multiple steps. So let's say if the value is between 1 and 3, as an example, then we want this process or this task to kick off. But we also need it to happen 2 more times. Okay, so if you place your cursor in the little area where it says describe which process to start, over on the left side, Peter, kind of the description of the task. Um, yep, there you go. And just place that and then hit enter on your keyboard. This is actually just a little lead simple hack that will allow you to duplicate tasks and their existing logic. All right, um, now we have to build this so that it works for up to, let's say, 5 properties. Okay, so we would actually do a regression of logic where we go with the first task It would be if it's between 1 and 3, do this. And for the next one, we'd say if it's between 1 and 2, do this. And we kind of use this backwards counting logic to tell the process how many of these need to be kicked off. And then based on the numerical value that we enter, it will display the right amount of processes or process triggers, I should say, and it will automatically start them.

Okay. This is crazy. This is new for me. Um, and then what, uh, what process would we kick off here?

So this would be starting our property onboarding process. Now, an important key to make note of here is that when you are running a process in LeadSimple, LeadSimple is a property-centric tool, right? Everything revolves around a property. So you can't have more than one property on a process. So for that reason, you wouldn't want to make these triggers automatic because they wouldn't work because we wouldn't know what properties to use for which process. But the idea of having these reminders here at all is that it helps you to not forget stuff. Because I don't know about you, but I forget stuff all the time. So having it show up on a task list to remind me, oh yeah, I need to start that process. And the first thing that will happen when you try to start the process it's going to ask you what's the address, right? You're going to have to choose. Here's my owner. Here's the address that goes with the property. And it's all going to be right there for you to enter.

Yeah. Okay. And not for nothing, Ben does this for a living. So if you guys want help with your processes, you're getting a little taste of his skills here on today's call. This is not meant to be like an ad for Ben or anything, but I just thought I would mention that, you know, he is available to hire for process help. Okay. What else? We got about 5 minutes left. Jared, how are you feeling right now? Like, what— is there anything we want to make sure that we cover that would be helpful for you in this new property or this owner onboarding process?

I mean, I feel like I'm learning a lot about—

especially, I mean, I'm learning too.

Yeah.

So Ben was right about the fire hose.

When you've been doing the same thing for 5 years, guys, you'll learn a few tips.

Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. Chat, while we have Ben, and any questions, any thoughts on this? And while folks are asking and thinking about that, I will go ahead and click share and make this available for anyone who wants to grab it and play around with it.

Yeah. Any questions, guys, about the onboarding process?

Jared? Yeah, I was— because you were talking, I guess, is this more of a marketing thing or is this with the owner onboarding? But you were talking about how sending follow-up emails after they've sent the PMA, besides just the initial one, you were saying you probably do it a couple of times while it's vacant.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the way, the way I think about it, Jared, is you want to kind of break down the relationship into really tangible pieces. So your sales process is really all about creating the relationship of trust and getting a contract signed. So I'd actually take the task for the management agreement and I would put that as the very end of your sales workflow in your CRM. That's the final piece. When that's done, then boom, it's time to operate. This is where we start our owner onboarding process. And in that owner onboarding process, again, we're focusing on the details of the owner and the reassuring, making sure that they are taken care of and feeling that we are high trusted people, that he's going to, you know, get all of the value that he's expecting from working with us. But I would do that in the owner onboarding because if you think about The way that you interact with the owner, you only get one chance to really blow the owner away, right? You've got one first time to say, look at us, we are amazing, and we are going to absolutely be the best choice that you ever made for managing your property. So I would build that into the owner onboarding because they're only going through that one time. But hopefully you have tons and tons of property onboardings that you do for that owner, right? Maybe they start with one, but if you establish a relationship of trust and that owner can be a long-term investor client, and you can help them actually build wealth, build generational wealth. Like, that's a really cool outcome, I think, when you kind of change your perspective a little bit. Instead of saying, hey, we're just here to manage your property, instead you become the, hey, we're here to help you change your children and your grandchildren's lives by helping you become a professional investor, and we can help you do that because we've got the the tabs on the market, and we know the deals, and we know how to take care of the properties. And you just be the investor and we'll help you do the rest.

Yeah. So I thought I would just show our owner onboarding process here at RL Property Management. We have about 700 doors under management. I think we've onboarded over 1,000 owners even though we only have 700 doors. You know, we've had owners come and go. We've been in business a long time. This process started as like a Word document with like 3 things on it. It moved over to Process Street. It moved over to LeadSimple. We broke it into separated, you know, property and owner into 2. But this thing has some reps on it. And a couple things I'll point out here. Here's like our client welcome email. Here's a video from me. That was one of Ben's suggestions. You know, here's us setting up the billing account, EFT payments. Um, we actually have an automation that every new owner gets enrolled in a new owner email onboarding series that's in MailChimp. So it's all like graphic and nice looking. Um, they get a series of 4 or 5 emails over the first like 3 months under management. We track a lot of stuff about our owners in Airtable. So we add them to Airtable, we schedule an onboarding call. Um, so here you can see that, you know, they get sent this email with a Calendly link to schedule the onboarding kickoff call. And then there's another email here. So, you know, we're sending them Loom videos about common things that new owners have questions about. And then we move to the next stage here. And I'm not gonna go through all these, but you can see that we have just a lot going on in the background to make sure that everything is covered and that every new owner is, is really set up for success. And here's this 120-day call. We get them in the PropertyMeld portal because we use PropertyMeld. We get them into our, we use NPS survey software called Retently. So when you check off this task, it fires a Zap that moves them over into that software. So there's a lot of really fun stuff you can do. And then it goes into this completed stage. So, That's kind of what this can look out— look like when it's fully built out. Now we don't have some of the cool automation that Ben was showing about automatically kicking off the property, uh, processes. So maybe that's like an upgrade that we could do here at RO Property Management.

Yeah, I think an important note is you don't have to do that, right? Those automations are just cool and fun and sexy, but the real value isn't having any process or checklist at all, right? Processes exist for error reduction. Do wrong stuff less. Yes. And having a simple checklist can accomplish that. You don't need all the fancy stuff in order for that to work.

100%. Okay. We are at time. Jared, thank you so much for coming on and being a little vulnerable and letting us dig in and, and try and build something for you. Hopefully this was of value. Yeah.

Thank you so much. I'm very grateful that you guys took the time to walk me through all this.

Cool. Well, thank you, Ben, for coming and joining and teaching me a couple of new things today.

I appreciate that. Absolutely.

Absolutely happy to do it. Big thanks to LeadSimple for hosting and organizing and, uh, putting this all together for us and let me, let me chat for an hour. Uh, thanks everyone for coming out and I will see you around.

See everybody. Bye.