Special - How I Took 5 Weeks Away From My Business

Before this time off, it was like RO Property Management is my job. And after 3 to 4 weeks off, RO Property Management is an option. And not that I plan to sell it or anything like that anytime soon, but there was definitely an element of like, oh, like this isn't my whole identity. This is just a thing that I'm doing right now. I don't have to do it forever if I don't want to., and I should make decisions appropriately. Welcome to season 2 of Owner Occupied on the business of property management. Owner Occupied is a show about property management in the real world. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder and CEO of RL Property Management. For season 2, I have a different guest each week and we go deep into conversation about what actually works when trying to build and scale your property management business. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back to Owner Occupied. I'm really excited today to have a conversation with Andy Vandenberg. Andy has generously agreed to come on the show and chat with me about my experiences taking over a month away from my business, and I'm excited to get to know Andy a little bit. So Andy, you were just chatting prior to the show launching here. It sounded like you had some great questions lined up and you were talking about sort of why you were interested, and I think that was a great way to kick it off. So why don't we go with that?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Peter, thanks for having me on and thanks for agreeing to submitting to all my questions that I have for you. Yeah. I think one of the reasons I saw you make this announcement on Twitter and it was so fascinating to me for two reasons. I think there's this whole work avenue aspect of it. And my business partner and I, we are lucky enough to share a lot of responsibilities. And so we can trade off. I can take two weeks off and he can cover me. But we have constantly been exploring what if both of us take two weeks or a month off and what would that do for our business? And so that's the whole work questions I have. The other thing is, I mean, this has to be pretty remarkable for removing yourself from work from a personal life standpoint. As well as just like a brain functioning rest standpoint. And so there's kind of two avenues I want to go down. Where do you want to start?

Yeah, let's start with the first. And what you were describing there reminds me a lot of the dynamic that my business partner and I had up until last year. So for, for about 8 years, he and I ran this property management company together side by side. And just like you were saying, one of us could go on vacation. That was easy because the other one would be there and kind of step in and vice versa. And we also kind of had that same thought of, hey, what if we were both gone? You know, what would that be like? It was always sort of theoretical. But then last year, about a year ago, we bought a small engineering company here in Columbus, and we both have an engineering background. So he went off to run that company as CEO. So he completely was out of the property management company here. And so his responsibilities got divided up. Some of them went to me and some of them went to other team members. And so then the question became much more real for me because it was like, not only can I take a 1-week vacation, that was even a question for a while until things kind of settled down. And then of course there was a lot of work that went into preparing to take off this 5 weeks or so. So yeah, that really resonates with me what you were describing there.

It must have been a little bit crazy to go from having a business partner to kind of being alone. And you hired a COO kind of around the same time period, it sounds like.

[Speaker:ELLIOT_BISNOW] Yeah. And just to clarify, he and I are 50/50 in everything. So he still owns 50% of this business. I own 50% of that engineering company, and we own the various real estate investments. It's all 50/50. But yeah, so we bought that company and he left in June of last year. And then I hired a director of maintenance right around that same time because my partner was involved in a lot of the maintenance activities. And so the director of maintenance took off a good chunk of the responsibilities that would've went to me otherwise. And then we kind of went along just fine until we started growing again. And then I realized I really did need someone over all of operations because if I wasn't able to extricate myself from operations, I just wasn't going to be able to make forward progress at all. And this was long before I had the idea to take a whole month off. So at the end of last year, I started searching for a COO, ended up finding a fantastic woman named Kathy Gaynor. She started in January of this year and has been really great for us. And as you know, that was a huge part of why I was able to take this break.

Yeah, that should be the first line on her resume. I joined a company in January and the boss took 5 weeks off in June.

Yep. Yeah, I think you're right. It, you know, definitely couldn't have done it. You know, there's a lot of things that had to be in place, but that was for sure one of them. Yeah.

Can you talk through a little bit of when did you first make the decision to take the 5 weeks off? And knowing your background, obviously you're very process-oriented and systems-oriented. You know, what did you need to do to really put the the business in place to make it happen?

Great question. So I first had the idea, I think it was around New Year's. I think it was. So every New Year's, around New Year's every year, I take a weekend away by myself. I go, I try to get a cabin in the woods. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me tweeting about this or talking about it in my newsletter. I'll try and get just a pretty rustic cottage or cabin away from everybody. There's a great spot called Hocking Hills, which is like an hour south of Columbus here in Ohio, which has a ton of these Airbnbs and vacation homes and stuff like that. So I try and do this every year where I take— it's usually like 2 days, 2 nights, something like that, where I get alone and I just think and I process and I prepare for the coming year. And so I'm pretty sure this idea came out of that. So this was— we're in 2022 here, so it would've been January of this year. And I just thought to myself, first of all, I realized that I had not had more than about 8 or 9 days off consecutively from work since I started working right out of college in 2007. So that's a long time to go. Between multiple jobs and even starting my own business without having more than basically a week off. So I felt like I'd kind of earned it. I've been working pretty hard here for a minute. And I also just was curious, what would it be like to take a whole month? Is it even possible? What would need to be in place? And I also felt like it would be a really good forcing function because even though I had hired the COO, or I was about to hire one at that point, What ends up happening is you offload a bunch of stuff, but then there's a bunch of operational details that you just kind of keep doing out of momentum. It sounds weird, but it's actually laziness because it's easier to just keep doing these little things rather than training someone how to do it. And it's just a whole thing. So I knew that if I took a whole month off, it would just completely force me to get all those little things off my plate that only take me 5 minutes a week or 20 minutes a day. But when you add them all up, it ends up that it kind of yanks you out of the strategic high-level planning that you really want to be operating at and pulls you back into some sort of very low-level operational function. So that was sort of the idea is like, okay, I need a break. This will be a great forcing function and let's just see if we can make this happen. And the reason I chose June is because Here in Ohio, June tends to be a pretty nice month weather-wise. And I just remembered last year, so many days I would go to work and it would be sunny and 73 degrees. I'd be like, "Man, wouldn't it be nice to not be working today?" Of course, everyone probably thinks that, but I was like, "Hey, don't I own the company? I mean, shouldn't I be able to do that if I really want to?" So that's why I chose June.

[Speaker:ROBERT_LEONARD] Yeah. When you set that goal in early January, did you actually think you were going to be able to make it happen and it was going to work out?

As I was thinking about and sort of putting together some, like, how I was able to make this happen, I did a little list on Twitter. And one of the ones, it was actually the last one, and as I reflected on it, I think it's the most important, which was stubborn belief that it was possible. From the first moment I had this idea, I was like, "I can make this happen. I can do this." And I think if I hadn't had that confidence, I wouldn't have been able to do it because I would've just become overwhelmed or just pushed it off a year or whatever.

[Speaker:ROBERT_LEONARD] It's funny that stubborn commitment to doing something I feel like is the most essential trait, but it sometimes can be viewed negatively by employees. You know how challenging it is for them to understand the goal of it. So I guess one of the questions I have, you kind of reflect on the 5 weeks. Did you get called at all? Was there any form of contact?

So I said no contact, you know, it was 99.9% no contact. I got a text message from our COO about— what was it regarding? Oh, so 2 employees got hired while I was gone, and I'm the only one who has like the administrator access to our Google account to like set up their emails. So I had to go in and set up their emails and I think order a credit card for one of them. And there was one other thing where, yeah, my COO called me because one of our contractors lost a key ring that had a bunch of our unit keys on it, 'cause he was doing a bunch of jobs for us. And so he had this key ring in his truck with all these unit keys, and his truck got broken into, and he couldn't find the ring with all of our unit keys on it. And so my COO was kind of freaking out like, "What do we do?" I was like, "Well, we need to call all these tenants and let them know that the keys are stolen." And I sort of told her what to do and then hung up and she went and did it. Well, it ended up that they weren't stolen. He found them in the truck later. So it actually didn't even need to happen. But yeah, other than that, it was completely no contact. I did not check my email whatsoever. I did not go into the office. I did not get a weekly summary of any kind. I told my COO when I left, I was like, "Okay, don't contact me unless you quit or," and I named one other key employee who I said, "If this person quits, I want to know." And I think the other one was anything happens that's going to prevent us from being able to continue doing business. So an example of that would be our payroll provider locked our account. Because they needed information or the Ohio Division of Real Estate needs to conduct an audit and we can't function without basically permission from them. So she knew going in that I really didn't want to be contacted unless it was something really, really major. And I told her, use your discretion. If you need to get ahold of me, get ahold of me.

Yeah. So I'd consider that a massive success then.

I do. I feel it was a success.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I've heard stories of people doing this and when you really dig into it, it turns out, oh, they had an hour call with the team. Once every week just to make sure everything was going and answering any questions. But this seems like a pure 100% removal apart from Google Admin and payroll, things like— or I guess just Google Admin. What was the most essential thing you did before? Looking back, apart from hiring, it sounds like, the COO, what was the number one thing that you think made this happen?

[Speaker:JOSH_MCGOWAN] I think it's a tie. I think there's 2 absolutely critical things that had to be in place. One of them was, aside from the stubborn belief that it was possible and the COO, which we kind of talked about both of those things, one was documented systems and processes for everything that we do. And if you know me at all, you know I'm big on systems and process. I talk about it all the time on Twitter. We use Notion, we use a bunch of other things to automate and standardize as much of what we do as possible. So having all that stuff already in Notion meant that when an emergency happened, we have a process and it's written down for what to do. And the process isn't call Peter because he's no— he knows what we did last time, right? That's not a process, you know. So as painful as it is as you operate your business on a day-to-day basis, every time you get asked a question, or every time you see something that was done correctly by an experienced employee, you've got to get that written down. You got to, you know, point by point by point. Here's what we do when we find a unit is uninhabitable. Here's what we do when a tenant is late with the rent. Here's how we set up a new client who has a duplex. You know, all that stuff has to be written down. So that was the one really, really key thing. The other really key thing I think has to do with the culture at our company and the team members that we have and how they think about doing their jobs. I've always been somebody who is very comfortable delegating and letting people make their own decisions almost to the point of abdication. And it's actually very disorienting for new employees when they first come and work here because they feel at loose ends because I don't give a lot of— I'm not a micromanager. I don't give them a time they need to be here, a time they need to leave. I'm like, I don't care if you take a break for 2 hours in the middle of the day. I'm results-oriented. And so if you haven't worked in an environment like that, it can be very confusing because you don't know what to do. You haven't been responsible for setting your own schedule and prioritizing before. But that's been the case at our company all along. And so the team is very comfortable operating without me giving input day by day by day. And so I think had that not been in place, this would have been such a shock that it wouldn't, it just wouldn't have worked. So putting that culture of accountability and empowerment in place was a huge part of it.

Yeah. That's something that takes a long time. And obviously, you can't teach overnight. On the process piece, I mean, this is something I've always been impressed by, you know, knowing a little bit about property management, you have so many unique situations. And that's very similar to my business. And I'm curious how you thought about putting processes in place for when something happens and it requires judgment.

[Speaker:ELLIOT_BISNOW] Yes. Fantastic question. Yeah. And I know exactly what you mean. And you're precisely correct in that almost every day, something happens here that's never happened before. Of course, there's the common things like, "Tenant is late with the rent," or, "We file an eviction," or, "We have a new client," or, "A client leaves." Yeah, of course, all that's documented. But You're right. What happens when a contractor who has 20 unit keys loses the key ring? Now, obviously that was so extreme that I got a call, but for every one of those, there's 10 that I didn't get a call on, but it was also something we had never experienced before. And so there's a few— there's really two answers to this. One is we need to do what's in the owner's best interest. So as a property management company in Ohio, we have a fiduciary duty to our client who's the property owner, and that's state law. If we don't abide by that, we can lose our license and I'll be out of business. So that's kind of the first thing I'll remind folks when they come to me. The question is, what would you do if you own this property? Or what, what is in the property owner's best interest? So that's the first thing that's almost the overriding what do we do in this situation answer. And then we also want to look at our core values. So we have a set of core values here at RO Property Management. And what we want to be able to do is use those core values in exactly this type of situation. We want to be able to take a look at our core values, and that should be giving us guidance in ambiguous situations. One of the greatest things I've ever heard someone say about core values is an effective core value should be something that someone could reasonably disagree with. Honesty is not a core value. That's just a given. Integrity, we work hard, all these boring things that everyone says, that's not a great core value. A core value, just as a random example, should be something like We work 60 hours a week because we believe in, we have a limited time on earth and we have a critical mission. Maybe that's your core value. That wouldn't be my core value because I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week. That's something that someone could reasonably disagree with. But for the right person, if they hear that a core value is we work 60 hours a week because we're working on some something that's so important, that might energize them and fire them up. And so that's kind of how we approach these sort of ambiguous type of situations.

Yeah, to go one step further. So obviously there's the philosophical alignment around these challenging situations. Do you put in further goalposts beyond that? An example being, we deal with this and our client is unhappy for XYZ, whatever happened, reason. We obviously are a client-first organization. To make things right, do whatever you need to do up to $4,000 cost. Or do you kind of put in parameters? Because everyone has a different view on what is right as well.

Yeah. So I don't know that I've ever made it that explicit, but you're giving me a good idea here. Now, one thing is for our property owners, we do have set maintenance approval limits. So like Most of our clients are on what we call a silver plan, which has a $500 maintenance approval limit. So if something goes wrong at their property, if it's going to be under $500 to fix it, we have to go ahead to just go ahead and do it. It's right in our contract. They already know that going in. If it's going to be over $500, we call them first to get approval. I think I've probably said before to our team, like, if we can fix a problem for less than $100, "Just don't even ask me. Let's just make it right. Let's waive the late fee or let's credit the owner back for the shovel that got stolen from his yard or whatever it is." But yeah, I think that's a great question and it's probably worth clarifying that a little bit further.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] So the other question I have, kind of you having felt the benefits of this, I guess for you and your company, do you think it's relevant for the COO to do this for 2 weeks to see if she's delegated appropriately or any other roles or could you envision this in a bigger company doing it? Apart from the owner.

Well, I know in financial organizations like banks, I think they require employees to take one week, like 7 consecutive days away from the business. It's for anti-fraud reasons or something like that, which I always thought was really interesting. It's again, a forcing function. So if you're running some scam using your access to the bank, In theory, I don't know, maybe it would get uncovered during that time you were away or whatever. Hmm. I haven't thought about this before. I mean, I definitely feel like it's hard with folks who are engaged in what I think of as direct labor, which is customer-facing or people who are actually doing the work. I mean, for them to step away for 2 weeks, we need to make arrangements for that. And I don't know that just because that would be hard for them to do, that doesn't mean that they're doing a bad job or something like that. Now, a higher-level manager or an executive, yeah, I feel like they should be able to step away because as a manager, if you're engaged in direct labor, that's a problem. You shouldn't be the one actually doing the work. You're supposed to be sort of guiding and helping facilitating, clearing the way for the people who are doing the work. So you should be able to step away for a week or two and just sort of reschedule your one-on-ones and maybe a couple things would get shared by some of the other folks. Interesting question.

Yeah, I only ask because I was thinking about it just as it relates to our businesses. What is some of our managers, what are they hiding from other— not hiding, but what are they protecting and actually doing work? Rather than managing and growing the team. And so different ways to understand that.

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If you had to do this again, what would be the one thing you would change going into it? Or, you know, coming back, what's the one thing that you want to change as soon as you re-entered the office?

So some things I would do differently— I don't know that I'm going to take a full 5 weeks off. That was a long time, and by the end of it, I was starting to get a little bit anxious about, you know, because I was so disconnected, I had no idea what was happening. And I was getting a little anxious like, hey, I kind of wonder what's going on with my company. Um, so that was a little distracting and maybe there's a compromise there with a check-in of some kind. But for me, I think it would be more valuable to split this up into maybe 3 or 4 2-week or 10-day breaks throughout the year rather than a whole month at once. I just don't think for me, I don't think I need a month away. I think 2 to 3 weeks is more than enough for me to disconnect. And so that's one thing that I think I might do differently. I also, I made a couple mistakes. I went into it with high expectations. You know, I had done all this planning and it was this big thing and everyone knew because I had been talking about it. And so I had this idea that I was going to come back from it with these grand visions and I was going to be on a mount, you know, on a mountaintop getting total clarity. But of course that didn't happen. And the lesson there is you go into something like this with low expectations. Just if you can get through it healthy and you get a little bit of time to yourself, that's a win. And if the team does a great job while you're away, that's a win. So having lower expectations, I think, would be something I would've done differently. The other thing I really messed up on was in the 2 or 3 months leading up to this time off, because I knew I was going to have a whole month at home, I stacked up a bunch of administrative tasks. So I was like, oh, I'll just do that on my month off. I'll have all this time. I'm not going to worry about it right now. Well, what ended up happening was I took— Monday comes around, my first day off. I've got a to-do list, 15 items long of all this random I got to renew my driver's license and I got to take the dog to the place and I got to paint this room and all this stuff that really I should have just been doing all along. It was kind of like now, you know, and I'm the type of person who I just can't ignore that stuff, right? Like I got to get it done and then I can have permission. I give myself permission to relax. Maybe that's a separate problem, but—

Well, yeah, that's, I think one of the, one of the key things I wanted to touch on here is, you know, for, for, I'm assuming, not knowing you too well, but your personality is very action-oriented. The goal of this whole thing is probably not to be action-oriented. So the inner turmoil that that may have caused during the 5 weeks off. Definitely, definitely. From a business question, one of the things, the debate I have in my head is obviously driven by revenue being the main goal. Obviously, operation fulfilling that is key driver of it. Do you feel like your business just survived during the month, or do you feel like it was able to thrive and keep growing and keep moving closer to the goals, or do you feel like you still retain the driver to those goals?

That's interesting. I'm still kind of— We're only one week. I've only been back one week as we record this, so I'm still catching up on what all transpired and where we are financially and things like that. But it's clear to me that we certainly didn't go backwards, you know. I don't know that we made massive forward progress in any specific area. There were some big projects that did get completed while I was gone, which was really cool to see. We had a slow sales month, which I don't know that that really would have been different if I was here because I'm not involved in the sales function pretty much at all. And of course, I have some major initiatives and projects that I'm the driver of that obviously we didn't make progress on those. But I'm trying to think if I extended this and I did a year, what would things have looked like if I came back? I think truthfully, the business was still gathering momentum and moving in a positive direction while I was gone. I think probably at a slightly slower pace. And there are certain things that only I can do or that only I am still doing. Now, a lot of those got taken off my plate in the months leading up, but there are some sort of quarterly and semiannual and annual things that really I am the only one who's really driving those. But I think this is in contrast to if a year ago I had done this, it would've been a totally different story. A lot of things would've fallen off the rails and I would be not calmly having this conversation with you one week afterward. I would be completely stressed out and freaking out and fixing all these fires and stuff. So yeah.

Yeah. Once again, major success. Now I have to ask, what did your employees think when you told them you were going to take 5 weeks off? Did you get any pictures of their faces or any funny reactions?

Nothing stands out. I had kind of, you know, let them know and gave everyone a lot of notice, of course. And I've always been, I've always been very disconnected when I took any time off. So even when I would take my one-week vacation in the summer that I had always done, that was always like a no-contact vacation. So they were used to that from that perspective. And I have I've always been, I think, fairly clear and direct with the people who work here that we're not a family. I've always hated that metaphor. I'm not like your dad or your brother, and I'm not expecting you to act like my mom or anything. So we're here to do a great job managing properties for our property owners. You're here to make a salary. I'm here to make a profit. There's no illusions about that. So I think that attitude, just being very frank and upfront, I think meant— and because I had been that way all along, I think my employees weren't surprised. They're probably like, oh yeah, yeah, that kind of makes sense. I didn't get the sense that anyone was mad or jealous or anything like that.

Yeah, it's so dependent on the industry. I work in the social impact space where everything we do is so mission-driven. And so I can imagine it being slightly different talking to our employees. Granted, I would say we are probably about 50% of where you are. We kind of take 2 weeks off, no contact, and have a lot of the processes in place. I think it's probably more pulling the trigger to actually make this happen and convincing yourself. Anything else you want to add from the work standpoint that you feel like is important to tell your audience?

Another part of, I think, what made this possible and what made it go well is that I knew going in that there were going to be problems. There was no doubt in my mind that while I was gone, not only was stuff going to come up that was kind of a mess because I wasn't there and people were sort of wishing that I, that I was there, but also just in the ordinary course of business, mistakes were going to happen as they always did, and I wasn't going to be there to like immediately fix them or notice them. So I knew that going in, and I think I was so comfortable with that. It wasn't a problem for me at all. I knew going in that that was going to happen, and it was completely fine with me that I would come back and I would find some things that were done differently than I would've done them, and that I was going to gently let people know, and then we would do it the right way moving forward. And I think the team knew that I knew that, and so they felt comfortable and empowered to make decisions that maybe even ended up being the wrong decision, but they knew that I wasn't going to come back and be all fire and brimstone about it. I was just going to be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, did you consider this and that? I probably would've done it this way, but hey, I'm glad you made the decision. We can, if necessary, make it right in whatever way we need to." But I think that was really important. Because you really, in small business, you just need to make a decision. If you let stuff stack up and stack up and stack up and you're kind of wringing your hands and your team's like doesn't know what to do and isn't making decisions, that's when you really get into trouble. Decisions generally are reversible, most of them. So if you make a decision, move on. So you made the wrong decision, great. You go back, you back it up, you make it right by the customer or the vendor or whatever it is. It's not that big of a deal.

If I can just interject, so much of this, I know it's probably you may not recognize it because I think probably you're in it every day. So much of what allowed you to do this, and I think probably your success in business comes from your cultural aspect that you keep bringing up in different ways, just coming from decentralization. And it's almost as simple as trust in the people. You obviously trust them to do what's right, and they know that you trust them. I think that's even more of a takeaway for me versus all the processes. It's like you have built this from the start is just the decentralization and trust in the employees.

Well, if you're listening to this and you want to work somewhere like that and help us build a great management company, you reach out.

Put this on your hiring page. Yeah.

So yeah, and of course I got to give credit to our team. Aside from everything we've talked about, about what I did, the team is what made this possible. If the people who worked here didn't come in with a great attitude every day and were diligent and careful with what they did and were very helpful and sort of lived our core values, it wouldn't have been able to happen. So credit where credit is due. The team was doing the work while I was on a beach, or I wasn't actually on a beach, but yeah.

I am one of the lucky people after college, I worked at a bank I got 14 straight business days off by law. It was the most amazing thing.

That was the thing I was talking about earlier. So you know all about it. Yeah. Why don't you share a little bit about what that was like and why that was required?

Yeah. So it's different depending on the different part of the bank you work in. So I traded FX and FX derivatives. And for us, anytime you are managing the bank's balance sheet through trading or through market making, You need to take a certain amount of time off every year to make sure you're not hiding trades or hiding money. [Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] There we go.

You should have completely interrupted me earlier and straightened me out because this is a much more articulate explanation.

[Speaker:JACK_MALLERS] Yeah, it's different for everyone, but I always felt so lucky to have that off. Most people go into the banking industry, work 90-hour weeks, and my first 2 years out of school, I had 2+ weeks off in a row. And so through that, I immediately got, wow, after the 1-week period, and really, I almost think it's after the 2-week period, your whole personality changes. And what I noticed is you're always, like for me, always glued to the phone. And even if I wasn't getting a ping, I'd be checking emails or doing something. After that 2 weeks, it's almost like my whole life, the trigger towards the phone or the emails aren't coming up and you can finally relax into your, you know, probably more your true personality and your true mind and mental state. So that kind of triggered me into the belief of how powerful this is. And so I guess, was that kind of similar to why you wanted to do the longer period reset?

Yes, precisely. I wanted to fully detach. I agree that the 1 to 2 week mark is when that starts to happen for sure.

So maybe just going from a high level, what was the 5-week itinerary plan and I guess high-level goals that you wanted to achieve?

So we kicked it off. My wife and I booked like a staycation at a nice, nicer hotel kind of north of the city here that had an indoor and an outdoor pool. And it was just kind of a low-key environment. So we stayed there for a couple nights with my 4-year-old daughter. That was a nice way to, you know, kind of kick it off with sort of a clean break rather than just staying at home. And then the next week I had like a full week just at home. There was nothing going on. My daughter was in day camp, my wife was doing her thing. And so it was that week there where I was kind of knocking out a lot of those admin type tasks I had accidentally let build up. So that was kind of ordinary. The only thing that really happened there was not a good thing. The gas company here in Columbus, Ohio called Columbia Gas, they're doing this project in our neighborhood where they're moving the gas meters from inside to outside. 'cause in a lot of these older homes they're inside. Well, again, an error I made here. I knew this had been coming and I had been kicking the can down the road on it for quite a while. Well, I happened to run into one of these company workers who was walking around our neighborhood early in June and he was like, "Hey, we really need to do your house." And I was like, "Okay, well I'm home all month. This will be great. Why don't you guys do it next week?" That was a big mistake. Because long story short, it ended up consuming like 4 of those 5 days was me messing around with these guys and their project. And it was just really dumb.

So that was a, that was kind of a fail, but, uh, it sounds like week 2, that week at home was a little bit of a miss that you wouldn't, you know, whether it's the admin work or the gas work, you wish you kind of had struck that week and done something different.

Yeah. Agreed. So the following week was great. I spent about 24 hours down in Birmingham, Alabama. Meeting up with a friend of mine who owns a property management company down there to check out his life in Birmingham. I had never been to Birmingham and see his office, and we recorded an episode of his podcast while I was down there. So you could argue maybe that was work, but it was honestly just more fun than anything else. So that was great. And then I came back and drove with my family to my parents' farm in New Jersey, which we do every year in June, and we spend 4 or 5 days there just hanging out with my parents and my sisters and their kids and their families. And so that's always a blast. So that was great. So that was the kind of second full week. And then the third week was another just kind of like low-key week where I was around the house. And that was better because there wasn't a problem with the gas company and I had knocked off a lot of the to-do items. And so I was able to get a lot of reading done and some writing and, you know, was able to spend some time by the pool because we have like a pool membership. And yeah, that was That was kind of like the week that was sort of how I envisioned things were going to be. So that was nice. What else? Okay. And then, so I kind of capped off the whole thing the following week. I went on this 3-day, 3-night sailing trip with my dad off the coast of Maine. It's called windjamming where you basically are on a— we were on like a 110-foot-long, 100-year-old schooner. Midcoast Maine. We sailed out of Rockport and kind of did that, that area over there. And that was incredible. That was a totally new experience for me. Totally, totally disconnected from everything and just brought some books and got to help sail a ship. And that was like really cool.

Yeah. You had never done a sailing trip before then?

I had done plenty of sailing, but nothing like that. Nothing like on a big schooner overnight. And yeah.

How many people did it take to sail that boat, or was there more modern technology?

There was no modern technology whatsoever. There was no electricity even on board the, the boat other than a couple like running lights. There was a wood stove that they cooked all the, the meals on, and it was unbelievable food. The, the cook there, the chef, was just fantastic. There was— okay, so your question, there was 5 crew 2 of those were like in the kitchen, so there was really 3 crew members. And we were able to help like raise the sails and raise the anchor. And yeah, it was pretty cool.

And that's a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Yeah, definitely recommend if you have a chance to do windjamming, really cool.

You jump in the ocean or it's too cold?

I did jump in the ocean. Not many people did, but I decided, you know, why not? I brought my swimsuit and everything. So yeah, I jumped off. We, at one point, we docked or we dropped anchor right off a deserted island. It was called Burnt Island off of Maine. We did a little lobster cookout and there was a little dock there. So I jumped off the dock and spent about 1 minute in the, I think the water is 52 degrees in the Atlantic Ocean, the north of, yeah, it's cold. So you don't spend long in there, but it was fun, refreshing.

Yeah, I'm a Midwesterner as well and I went to school in Maine and I just remember the When you see it, it's just the coastline is so beautiful. It's so different than anything else.

Yeah.

Where'd you go? Colby College, middle of Maine, small liberal arts school.

Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. I love Maine. We get up there at least twice a year for one reason or another and got a lot of family history in Maine. So yeah, I'm a big fan.

Did your relationships with your family change at all during that month?

Maybe a little bit. I get plenty of time with my family anyway. I've always been pretty strict on working 40 hours a week. I'm not one of those guys. Who's leaving at 6:00 AM and doesn't get back till 7:00 PM or anything. So I see plenty of my family. I definitely got to spend some more time with my daughter, which was really fun, kind of deepen that relationship further. And I saw plenty of my wife because she was mostly around the house. Yeah, I think it was good, especially that first few days at the hotel to kick things off. I think that was great.

Yeah. If you were to do kind of these 2 to 3 week buckets going forward, would you incorporate more solo time or more time traveling to see your dad or do something with your dad or your friend or friends? How would you think about the balance of the two?

So for me, what I've learned about myself is if I get about 2 days of solo time consecutively, I'm like, good. Like I'm kind of like soloed out. And I'm at that point, I'm happy to reenter the world and do whatever. So I think if I was doing it over, I would definitely make sure I got some of that solo time, maybe toward the beginning and toward the end, I would block off a couple days each. But then what I would do is make sure that the other days were more filled up with activities, whether that's family stuff or meeting up with friends or traveling. I think that I get a lot more out of that than just hanging around the house or being by myself.

It sounds like you have a lot of experience doing these, removing yourself from the world and the business, really reflecting on it. Having 5 weeks off, did you come back with a new personal vision for your relationship with the business or where you want the business to go or anything in your career? I've heard of entrepreneurs who spend 10 years doing something, take a month or two off, and they have a whole new view and new goals. Did you have that experience?

I didn't have quite to that level, but I did definitely notice a couple things changed. One, after I think the second or third week, kind of like what you were saying earlier, I, I could feel that I was detaching from the business. And I started— my identity was detaching from RO Property Management. My company. And I started to view my business— the way I phrase this is like, before this time off, it was like, RO Property Management is my job. And after 3 to 4 weeks off, RO Property Management is an option. And not that I plan to sell it or anything like that anytime soon, but there was definitely an element of like, oh, like this isn't my whole identity. This is just a thing that I'm doing right now. I don't have to do it forever if I don't want to. And I should make decisions appropriately. Like I don't owe this business anything and I don't have to be like beholden to the whims of whatever's going on there. You know, it's just a thing that's happening, and if I can contribute to it and I get value out of that for now, great, I'm gonna continue doing that. And that is the case, so I am gonna continue doing that. I think the other thing that really, I wanna make sure I say this 'cause I think it was one of my biggest takeaways. While I was gone, I broke my dopamine addiction to email, and I did not realize how bad it was until I came back. But I was addicted to email. And what's weird is that my, my addiction is different, I think, than a lot of people because I'm not one of those people who has notifications on my phone. So I've always been someone who never checks work email when I'm not working. So weekends and evenings, I don't check my work email, and I haven't done that for many, many, many years. So I thought I was good. I thought that I was like ahead of this problem and thought of myself as being very, you know, have it all together when it comes to email and how you should be with it. But what actually is the case is that, especially in the last couple years, it had gotten really bad. When I'm at work, I was operating out of my email inbox all day long. And so anytime I got a new email, boom, I was on it. I was clicking on it. I was getting that dopamine hit from, from reading. And then, and then the other dopamine that I would get is when I would reply and like solve the problem or respond to the email or forward it to the right person. I was like, boom, I'm making progress. I'm getting things done. This feels good. And I was really like, I really like had this good feeling from it. You know, it's not like I was addicted to alcohol or something. So it's not like the worst thing in the world, but it was definitely not good because it was preventing me from getting the things done that I really needed to get done. It was preventing me from getting the important but not urgent items completed. And it's not like none of that stuff was happening because I was obviously still getting some of those things completed out of necessity. But so ever since I came back, what happened while I was gone is I got 500 emails. So I got back, opened up the Gmail inbox, 500 unread. So what was kind of beautiful about that is it was so much that I knew there was no way I could catch up anytime soon. So I didn't even try. So as soon as I opened my email and I saw that, I like closed the tab right away. And I was like, you know what, let me see what else is going on before I get into my email inbox. So I went around, I talked to all the team members, I processed the mail that had come, I sort of looked at what had been lingering on my to-do list from before I left, and I just started knocking stuff out. And then after lunch, I was like, yeah, let me dip into my email here. Let me just start working on it. So I spent like half an hour and I worked from the oldest to the newest. So I went all the way back to June 1st and I worked. So I processed 30 minutes worth of emails. And at that point I was like, it was time to go home or I had a meeting or something. And so I just closed it and I didn't even do anything with it until the next day. So the next day. I came back and more emails had come. And so at this point I was like, okay, I got to— so I put up an out of office that just said responses are going to be delayed because I'm catching up from being out. And I decided that at this point I was recognizing the fact that, wow, this is great. I'm getting all this stuff done in the morning without looking at my email. Maybe I should keep this going. So I made the decision that I wasn't going to check email at all in the mornings. And that I was going to give my email inbox 30 minutes to an hour in the afternoons going oldest to newest. And I would get as far as I get and then I'm going to close it and I'm going to move on with my day. And so I've stuck with that since I've been back and I'm loving it. I'm getting all kinds of stuff done. I'm not feeling like I need to like jump back to my inbox after any little thing is done. And I think it's just it's just a better way to be for me for now, for right now. So that was a big— there's no way that would have happened if I hadn't taken this break for sure, because I needed that 5 weeks to really break that, that habit.

Do you think it was— first of all, it's amazing, and it's something I want to remind myself every day, like responding to emails does not get you that much closer to your, your goals. Correct. Doesn't, you know, that's— but it's easy to say that if you're in sales, correct?

And if you work for me, especially if you're in sales, you need to be fucking— you need to be in your, in your inbox. All day. Yeah, we're calling people back, responding to emails, right?

Yeah. If you're not responding to an email, get on the phone and start cold calling. Do you think that was, you know, what percentage of that was just you removing the dopamine hit versus you coming back after 5 weeks recognizing like, now the business can kind of stay at that steady state even if I don't respond to these emails?

Hmm. Yeah, that was definitely part of it. And so we're over a week now I've been back, or about a week, and I've gotten all the way in my— even in the 30 minutes— that's the other thing that's crazy. In the 30 minutes to an hour I give my email inbox now, I was able to process all those emails. Like, as of today, I'm caught up to July 1st or July 3rd or something. I'm, I'm getting pretty caught up. And so I was able to get a whole month's worth of email done in basically 30 minutes a day for 5 days or 6 days. So that tells you how much time I was wasting because the reality is it just doesn't take that much time if you batch it, if you do it all at once. The other thing that's amazing is if you let yourself get 2 weeks behind on email, it's amazing how many of those emails are just no longer relevant by the time you see them. It's like someone else took care of it or it was something you thought was urgent and ended up not even mattering or it's pretty remarkable. So I think There's definitely an element of like, so now I've processed all of June's email and it's amazing that there was basically almost nothing in there that I needed to have seen. It was not that big of a deal. So yeah, I think that also speaks to what you were saying, which is not only did I break that dopamine hit, but it took that to realize, okay, it's actually not that important. If you would've asked me before, I would've felt like, well, what if this happens? I need to be able to respond right away. And It's just something we tell ourselves. There's other things that are way more important and are going to move the needle way further in your business than responding in 2 hours instead of 2 days to whatever.

Yeah. Are you internally a Slack organization too, I believe?

Yeah, we use Slack.

How do you handle that?

So Slack, I do leave kind of open. On the desktop all day. I don't have notifications on my phone, but I will open Slack on my phone once in a while if I'm out just to see what's going on. But there's not— we're still fairly small here, so we only have a couple channels and they're just not that active. There's not a lot of chitchat and noise, so just there's not that much going on.

So you kind of have talked about this, going forward it sounds like you're going to do more smaller breaks. Have you built that plan yet? Are you kind of seeing how the first month comes back and how you want to plan from there?

Haven't built that plan yet. I feel like I need to sort of earn my keep here again for a few weeks before I start planning the next break, I guess. Maybe that's not logical, but yeah, I haven't thought too much about it. I'm definitely going to try and still plan them around the nicer weather here in Central Ohio, which is May, June, And then probably September, those are when it's kind of mild.

Yeah. Does that correlate with your quieter times of year? Is that when most people are moving in and out?

May and June is definitely super busy with leasing and turnovers. September, not as much, but I'm not really involved in that part of things at all. So I don't think it really affects anyone.

Yeah. All right. The last question I have is on Twitter, you posted a picture of, I believe, someone had connected, must be a connection you had, sent a referral over to you. What was— the referral responded, wow, he's taking 5 weeks off, must be a great business. What was your out of office? What did it say? And did you get any funny replies to your out of office?

So my out of office was very basic. I think it just said, I'm currently out of office for the month of June. "Please contact..." And I kind of gave our main office contact info at rlpmg.com and our main office phone number. I think that was pretty much it. I didn't really elaborate or give any other contact info for me personally or anything. Funny responses? I mean, I definitely got a lot of people wishing me well and saying, "I hope you had a great break," or, "I hope this is very fulfilling for you," and things like that. But yeah, that response you're talking about where— so basically what it was, someone saw that response. So a contact of mine referred me a lead who owned a property that was looking for a property manager. And the person who got referred to us emailed me, saw that response, and then replied back again to the person who made the referral and me and said something like, 'Wow, you must have a really great business if you're able to step away for a month. Let me know when you're back. I'd love to talk.' Well, I thought that was great because that sounds like the type of client we want to work with, right? As somebody who understands and appreciates that, hey, the people who work here at the management company have a life and aren't just robots who are here to serve your every whim. And, you know, that's obviously someone who has an appreciation for a well-run small business and understands that we're not a Fortune 500 company and Yes, people do take time off. So that was a, that was a nice thing to see. And yeah, that's cool. I'm glad you reminded me about that.

Yeah, well, my takeaway from that actually wasn't around the, you know, personal benefits. My takeaway was it's actually a fascinating sales technique. Because when I think of, when I think of property management, I think of constantly putting out fires. And you must have a very well-run organization if the main decision maker historically can take 5 weeks off. And if I were running a property, I'd be like, "Oh, if he trusts his team enough to do that, I can trust him." That was my takeaway, which I thought was interesting.

I hope that's what he thought. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Maybe we should put that on our website. The owner takes a 5-week break every June. Yeah, exactly.

You want to work with us? Well, that's all the questions I have for you. I just want to thank you again for being so open about sharing this because I think Hopefully, this is a trend that more and more people do. I think as the world recognizes the benefit of taking breaks, as well as—

Don't Europeans do this all the time? I feel like anyone who's European and listening to this is probably like, "What the hell is the big deal with this guy? Thinks he's so cool taking 5 weeks off." Well, it's funny you said that.

I was with a friend who works for a French company, Babolat, the tennis company, and their entire company is, I would say, effectively closed from end of July to beginning of September. And I was telling him about this podcast and he just kind of laughed. And I was like, yeah, we know you guys have figured it out. We are still trying to figure it out here.

Yeah. It is hard when the whole culture is pulling you in one direction. And I will say it felt weird, right? It felt weird to go against the grain. And I had my little, you know, I had folks on Twitter who were kind of cheering me on and a group of folks who were sort of all about that and understood what that would really be like, but it was definitely kind of odd to be at home during the week, not working as a 36-year-old male. The whole world expects that someone like me should be at work all the time. And if I'm not at work, I should be in Florida on a beach, right? The world is not set up for folks to be just not working, who are of prime working age, especially males. So that was really interesting. And it was an interesting experience, I guess, to break from the pattern that the culture is very strongly reinforcing, even in this modern day.

Did you feel like society had won and you felt like you should be working at that point, or did you just feel awkward seeing that other people probably thought you should be working?

I didn't really care either way, but it was— I just noticed, I maybe I did feel a little bit, I felt a little bit awkward, I guess, because especially having to explain it to somebody, you know, you go and get your haircut or whatever and they're like, oh, you're off work for the day? And it's like, I don't know if I really want to like explain this whole situation to this guy who— I don't know, it's just, yeah, so yeah.

Well, I appreciate you for being so open. I don't have any more questions. This has been enlightening for me, and I hope other people who listen enjoy it as well.

Awesome. Yeah, this has been really fun. I appreciate you coming on, Andy. And this was a connection that just happened through Twitter. You reached out and said, "Hey, I'd love to ask you a few questions. We can do it on your podcast." And I said, "Yeah, that sounds fantastic." So hopefully everyone got some value out of that. I'm happy to share more about my experiences if anyone has questions. And My real goal here is that I want to enable more people to be able to do this type of thing. So I share what I learn as I go. And I'd love, you know, if you're listening to this, I'd love to be able to try and make this happen for you. So let me know how I can help. Thank you, Andy.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for listening to Owner Occupied. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann. And subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.