Special - Peter on 300 to 3000

the process of writing something down, even if it's just a few sentences for a tweet or a short thread, you actually become clearer yourself on the topic through the process of writing. It's like the old thing about you can't, like you're not an expert until you've taught it or I don't know, something like that. So I think that's really been really valuable and the connections that you build, you couldn't put a number on it, right? Like, I mean, you and I are here today, Matthew, and just countless other connections, opportunities, information. I mean, I've learned as much as I've shared or more from other real estate operators. You know, we have 650 units, but there's folks on that app who have 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 units under management and they're giving it all away. So there's huge, huge benefits.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of 300 to 3,000. I am one of your hosts, Spencer Sutton, and I'm here with my co-host, Matthew Whitaker. Matthew, welcome to my office. We're recording this in my office. This is what this office was built for.

AKA the new podcast studio.

That's right.

Spencer went out and bought some really expensive chairs. Over budget on the office, and Spencer went out, typical marketing, went out and bought new chairs.

To my defense, I bought these before our new CFO came in and shut me down.

I noticed that like when—

So they were on the way.

I noticed that when I told you he was coming, you went out and spent a bunch of money.

I did.

I did.

I just ran the Amex up like $100,000.

So, yep. Yep. Be good. Well, we're excited today. We've got a guest actually in studio. In studio. Studio. Yeah.

We've interviewed somebody in the studio.

It's a show of firsts. So Peter Lohmann, who is with RL Property Management in Columbus, Ohio. He's actually a friendly competitor of ours because we have a We have an office up there, and Peter and I have become friends a lot through social media and obviously seeing each other at NARPM events. And excited to have you here. So welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Really excited.

And you let me be on your podcast too. So this is not like a, like a tit for tat. I'm actually excited to have you on the podcast.

Yes. Reciprocate. Reciprocity. That was my thought the whole time.

There you go. There you go.

He's like, be on my podcast and I'm going to fly into Birmingham and hang out with you.

Well, you were just telling me that your podcast is actually getting sponsored by a pretty well-known reputable company in our industry. And I'm like, well, what in the heck Spencer been doing? We can't get anybody to sponsor this thing.

No, we can't. Nobody wants to sponsor our show, Matthew.

Well, if you need some help, I'm available. I'll send you my rate sheet.

10%.

We'll get it all figured out.

I think it's really like if Matthew delivered some high-quality content, we'd probably have—

Oh, that must be what it is.

We definitely would have some people reach out to us.

That's not what they're telling me.

I did have a couple sponsors say, you know, I gave them the guest list and I said, well, this isn't going to be on the one with Matthew.

I think that got you the whole sponsorship. You said no, you can't just be on that one. You got to sponsor the whole season to be on that one. Well, uh, super pumped to have you here. I've got at least a couple of subjects I think that you are an expert in, and I want to cover those. But, um, I think the first thing I'd love to do is just kind of talk a little bit about how we got to know each other. Is you've done an incredible job of creating a social media presence Tell a quick story. I've got a friend that lives in Colorado who is a follower on Twitter. He's one of these guys that he never posts. He's too wimpy to post.

A lurker.

A lurker, yes. There is a word for that. He's a lurker and he sends me your tweets from time to time. And my point to him is like, I know Peter. You don't need to send me these things. I know Peter. One time you were kind enough to say that, this podcast was one of the 5 you would listen to, and so I appreciate that. But would just love to know, like, kind of tell us about your strategy, tell us about kind of like your goals with being an influencer on social media.

Yeah, so I really started to become active on Twitter, which is kind of my primary social media platform, I guess, about a year and a half ago. I kind of stumbled into what's kind of casually called Real Estate Twitter, which is, it's not like a formal organization or anything. It's just a group of people on Twitter who talk about real estate investing, real estate private equity, running a GP fund, and these types of topics. And I thought it was really interesting because folks were sharing tons and tons of detailed information that you would've never expected to see shared in like a public way. The type of information and conversations that normally only happens at the bar at a conference is actually happening in public and in like a really collaborative, inclusive way, and in a way that the folks who are participating are all kind of sharpening their swords, right? They're engaging in some friendly debate. They're talking about what's worked for them, what hasn't worked for them.. And so I, I thought this was really fascinating. Now I had been on Twitter going back a decade, but I had never seen this type of content on that platform before. So I became really interested and started kind of nibbling around the edges of the conversation with some property management topics chiming in where I thought I could be valuable. And a few of the folks in that community encouraged me, liked the content and said, hey, we'd love to hear more about, you know, it sounds like you got something interesting going on with property management. So I started sharing more and more about our own experiences with growing our management company in Columbus. Just for a sense of scale, we're up to about 650 units there. And then sort of parallel to this, there's a community on Twitter called SMB Twitter or Small Business Twitter. And again, similar to real estate, it's just a bunch of like small business owners sharing what's worked for them, what hasn't worked. And there's a component of like search fund investors who are people who are trying to buy a small business versus start one. So anyway, I started to make a deliberate effort to share content in that format. And Twitter's like a really specific format, right? It's like short, punchy text, right? So it's text-based primarily. And sometimes you can do a thread, which is like multiple tweets together where you can share more of long-form information. And I was surprised at how much it was working for me, and I think a lot of people are intimidated by social media or by some of these newer sort of like content marketing, right? And I think you really have to like find the platform that feels native for you Like, for me, Twitter just worked because, like, something about the way I think and the way I write, it just resonated with that audience. But Instagram has never worked for me. I have like 150 followers on Instagram. I have 13,000 followers on Twitter. Wow. But I just— I can't— whatever it is that works for me on Twitter, it just doesn't work on Instagram. Instagram's like a visual thing. It's a different culture. There's different norms around what you share and what you don't share and how you engage, right? Like Twitter, there's a huge culture of like sharing in the comments as a way to build on the conversation. And that just doesn't really exist on Instagram, just as an example. Same thing with Facebook. I've never had a whole lot of success with Facebook. I'm experimenting with LinkedIn a little bit. So what's really worked for me is You go deep on one platform, which for me is Twitter, but it could be anything that works for whatever feels natural for you. And then you take the content that performs best and you sort of repurpose that on some of the other platforms. And that way you kind of get some more reach and some more spread.

It's a Gary Vee way of looking at it, right? Like create the content one time, share it as many times as possible. I had to beg Spencer to shut down our Instagram account because we would post a video and there'd be 10 people watching it. And my mom was one of the ones that liked it. A lot of them were relatives of ours.

Yeah.

And I was I was just like, this is a big waste of time. If we're spending any time trying to post this. The other thing is we've kind of gone deep on LinkedIn. The difference being Twitter is all about transparency and uncovering your warts. Well, LinkedIn's a highlight reel. So me and Spencer, we don't have the guts to show all of our warts, so we just post on LinkedIn.

Yeah, but hadn't you started on LinkedIn?

Hadn't you? On Twitter? I mean, on Twitter, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I started and then I stopped, and I've started and stopped. I mean, part of it's just the consistency to post. I'm not as deep as Peter is, 'cause he's got like tons of content to post. You know, I had a whole week's worth of content, and then I ran through everything I could say, and now I'm kind of like stuck. Now you're back to LinkedIn. Yeah, now I'm back to highlight reels.

Yeah, it's tough. It's, you know, I was posting on Twitter for a decade and got nothing, right, until I found the format and the topic.

You find your group, your topic, your niche, and you're just like, I'll just go all in on this.

And man, he is famous. I mean, 14,000 followers is incredible. It wasn't too long ago that you hit 10,000 followers. So the fact that now this is— we were talking about, you and I were talking about the flywheel earlier. The flywheel has really taken off. It shows you that getting to 10,000 was really hard and then the next 4,000 has come, sounds like fairly easily.

Yeah. There, once you like anything, right? Like we were talking about, the bigger it gets, it kind of takes on a life of its own. So now I'm getting drawn into conversations from other folks on Twitter. And so I'm just naturally getting more engagement, even though I'm not even posting, right? So it's one of those things that's just like, once you get it up and rolling, and the algorithm actually rewards this too, the algorithm that sort of decides what you see on Twitter, as a poster on Twitter, The algorithm sort of encourages you to post frequently and encourages you to use the app frequently, and if you do that, your posts get more traction. Interesting. So it's, yeah.

And my question would be, I mean, somebody's listening to this and they took a step back, like, what would be the benefit of somebody creating a brand, whether it's on Twitter or LinkedIn or somewhere, maybe Facebook, having a Facebook group?

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of benefits. I think for one thing, taking some time to really think about sort of who you are, who you're trying to be, I think is just important generally, even if that's as far as you take it. And then in the process of trying to create content for whatever platform it is, you end up having to write And I think most people would agree that writing really forces you to get clear on your thoughts. Yeah. Right? The process of writing something down, even if it's just a few sentences for a tweet or a short thread, you actually become clearer yourself on the topic through the process of writing. It's like the old thing about you're not an expert until you've taught it, or I don't know, something like that. Right. So I think that's been really valuable. And the connections that you build are— you couldn't put a number on it, right? Like, I mean, you and I are here today, Matthew, and just countless other connections, opportunities, information. I mean, I've learned as much as I've shared or more from other real estate operators. You know, we have 650 units, but there's folks on that app who have 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 units under management. You know, some of these are big groups that own and manage everything themselves, and they're giving it all away. They're literally telling you, here's how we think about lease renewals, here's how we think about unit turnovers, here's how we think about the going-in cap rate, you know, all the stuff that's even like beyond me. So there's huge, huge benefits. And I think the way we're kind of going as a society, you know, it used to be like, and this is probably even like our parents' generation, you show up to work, you do a good job, you be nice to your boss, right? And you're going to get promoted. And you're, you know, there was a loyalty factor there with the old, you know, big Fortune 500 companies, and you would get a pension. And like, that was, that was what was rewarded by the marketplace of employers, right? Well, I think things have changed a lot, and most people would agree that that dynamic doesn't really exist anymore. So The value of having a personal brand today is massive because you can take that and leverage it into all kinds of different opportunities, and not even necessarily a job, but you may become connected to a future business partner or a consulting opportunity or a potential advertiser or who knows what, but I think that you really— the value of kind of putting yourself out there And I think if you want to be successful, you really have to take an angle. You have to develop a unique voice or a unique position. Right? Like if you just kind of tweet generic, boring, fluffy, almost kind of like the LinkedIn stuff, I hate to say it. That's just—

Are you talking about my LinkedIn stuff? You sound like really—

Oh my gosh.

For those of you who are listening to this thing right now. He looked literally directly at Matthew and said the boring fluffy stuff.

He was talking to Spencer and then he looked at me for that.

Yeah, no, I don't. Yeah, not saying you, Matthew, but we've all seen this stuff on LinkedIn. It's like, I was on the way to work and I saw a puppy. I don't know, you see these ridiculous things on LinkedIn.

I'm going to delete that right now on my phone.

He just posted that this morning, Peter.

So, but taking this— I'll just quickly wrap up— taking a position or an angle, and then you're sort of like, you become known as like, oh yeah, that's that guy, that X. Right? And people, and even if they disagree with it, they're like, they remember you, they remember what you're about. And yeah, I think it's really important.

What I love, what you've also done, and I'd like for you to talk a little bit about this, is you've kind of taken it off of just Twitter, which is a platform that you don't own, and you started to build an email list. Yeah, so that you can own that, you know, you own that email list, and there's people who've raised their hands and said, hey, I'm I want to subscribe. I want to hear what you have to say, Peter. So talk about that. Like, why did you decide to do that, and how often do you send out emails to your, to your group? And yeah, tell us a little bit more about it.

Yep, so that's exactly right. Shortly after sort of Twitter, I saw it was becoming more and more valuable for me. I started an email list as a way to capture contact information for folks I was engaging with regularly because you know, just like you said, Spencer, you don't own the platform. I don't own Twitter. I could get shut down. I could get canceled. My account could get hacked or blocked, or Twitter could completely change their algorithm so that it no longer rewards the type of content that I'm sharing. And now what? I'm like back to square one. It's almost as if all that work was for nothing. So by building an email list, you now own your mode of distribution. So you can email that list whenever you want. You know, you still have to create compelling content, right? If you're just spamming people with boring nonsense or sponsored content that's not relevant to them, they're quickly going to mark you as spam or unsubscribe. But at least you can have a chance of getting in front of them. And so you'll see if you follow me on Twitter on tweets that go kind of particularly well, I'll kind of put at the end like, hey, if you like this type of thing, I have a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe here, right? And I actually, not weekly, I try to send out when I have something useful to share, which ends up being like every few weeks, and it's kind of like a roundup of like any long-form content that I've written on my website, any podcasts that I was recently on, or my own podcast, and then other interesting content that I've come across that I think is relevant to my audience, which is I think mostly other property management company owners or people who are looking to start a property management company. I think it's important to distinguish that from my management company, which has its completely own separate brand, website, blog, email list, Twitter, Instagram, is, is all separate and has its own purposes, its own sending frequency, and it's a different type of content, right? Because that company, RL Property Management, its audience is property owners, potential clients of the business, whereas my audience is other property management company owners who don't want— they don't care at all about, you know, Columbus real estate news or whatever. So you got to think about this when you're sort of constructing your plans as it relates to content. Social media is like, who is your audience and how can you provide value to them? That's really what it's all about. And if you can do that well the market, right, the marketplace of ideas is gonna reward you by giving you followers and subscribers and yeah.

[Speaker] I think you and I have a very similar audience. I've tried to build it on LinkedIn where it's small business owners, it is property managers, you know, I'm speaking to them, but you've done that on Twitter. And I think your point is, it needs to really hit home with everybody that's listening is, you need to know who your audience is. And one of the ways I've found who my audience is, is what am I passionate about? I may not be as passionate as, say, Gray Hall is, who runs our brokerage business, about investing in homes. He reads about it, he listens to podcasts, he's constantly coming up with new information, and that may be his audience. Whereas I'm mostly reading about leadership and growing businesses, and that's who should be my audience, right? And so just being crystal clear on who you want to talk to or who you want to speak to. And of course, for us, it's about If I can speak to the property management company owners, then that gives us the ability to ask them, "Hey, when you're ready to sell your business..." So that's kind of our angle, which we've talked about on the podcast a number of times, is once we've established trust through the podcast, then we hope at some point when somebody's ready to exit their business, then they come to us. And that's the reason for building that audience. You've come at it from a different angle in that, I mean, I was just amazed at the number of vendors that wanted to sponsor you, whether it's the podcast or your content, and then the consulting opportunities that have come your way just from building your brand. And like I said, literally this guy and then one other person that should not know you, like there's no reason for them to know you, Both like sent me a screenshot of a tweet that you sent out.

Yeah, and I think a couple thoughts on that. One is you're probably not going to be successful here unless you do what you just said, which is you have to be sharing content that's interesting to you, right? Like I would fail miserably and have failed miserably at writing the blog content for our property management website, right? Because I just don't have a passion anymore for writing content for small landlords and real estate investors. Like, I was super into that like 11 years ago, but like, I've kind of— it's just, it was— I got over it. Like, I kind of moved on to a different thing in my life. Not that it's like new or better or something. It's just It's just not where I am anymore. And so if I was trying to force myself to write a blog every week on how to buy a rental property in Columbus, Ohio, I would fail. And I have failed. I've tried to do that before and it didn't work, but I have no trouble at all writing almost a weekly blog on topics that are interesting to property management company owners because that's what I'm super into right now. And so the content that I'm writing on my blog, which is more of longer form stuff, than what I write on Twitter is things that are— I'm almost writing it for me. It's like I got curious one day about VC investing in property management companies. Like, man, I keep hearing about all these companies that are like taking VC money. I wonder just how many of these companies there are and how much money they've raised. So I started like taking some notes on my phone of like all the companies I could remember the name of. And eventually that became a blog post because I was like, well, I'm really curious about this. And if I'm going to go through all the work of actually researching it, I'll just throw it up on my blog and then I'll kind of update it whenever I hear of a new raise or whatever. And tons of people were interested in that and it's gotten a ton of traction. A lot of people have brought it up to me randomly, you know, people I don't even know. So the best tip I could give about writing that longer form content, which someone told me, is write to be useful. And I think that's really helped me as I've decided what is worth taking the time to write like a longer form piece on. So the other comment I had, Matthew, on what you were just saying is I've had a lot of people ask me like, what is your goal with your social media and your email newsletter? And the truthful answer is I don't really know. I just know that it's probably going to be useful one day. And already it's been incredibly valuable through connections and some of the other things I just mentioned. But the email list specifically and the email newsletter, I have no grand plan for that audience and for that platform. But I have a feeling that one day I'm going to be really glad that I was capturing those email addresses along the way and providing valuable content for my readers for all those years or whatever it is. When one day I might have an ask of them like, hey, I'm doing a new thing or I'm available for consulting or check out this, whatever it is, I think that's useful or will be.

And you're already monetizing it. And I've seen and you've seen people raise capital in 10 minutes by saying, hey, I'm starting this fund. And because they have followers on Twitter, these people are reaching out to them and raising millions and millions of dollars in minutes. And so you're right, anytime you can build a personal brand and build an audience. I'm kind of curious, kind of two questions that are a little bit different, but how do you think about repurposing the content? I know you're kind of focused on Twitter and now you're starting to repurpose it for LinkedIn.

So for Twitter, it turns out that Twitter is a great place to sort of test out content and figure out what resonates with your audience.

Just stick your toe in the water.

Stick your toe in the water because there's really no penalty for tweeting a lot. You could tweet like 10 times a day. The algorithm doesn't blink. In fact, it almost encourages that. And so you can tweet about all kinds of different topics. You can experiment with different formats. You can experiment with threads, you can experiment with images, you can experiment with videos, and over time you're going to get a sense pretty quickly of what is working, like what interests the people who are following you. Because Twitter provides a ton of metrics around— I mean, there's the obvious metrics of like how many likes did your tweet get and how many replies, but you can also go on the back end and look at how many impressions it got. So you can see sort of how many people actually saw that tweet. So what I do is I use that as a way to understand what types of content is interesting to my audience, and I can do a couple things with that information. One is I can tweet more about it and get more followers. I can also write a longer-form content piece on that specific topic, so I can then go onto my blog and write more about whether it's, you know, self-showing or lease renewal policies or whatever it is. And then again, that's providing more value. And then the other thing is I take the best of my Twitter, the tweets that did the best, and our marketing group then posts that on my LinkedIn. And then that LinkedIn post will end up doing really well because it's already tried and true. It's proven. It's known to like resonate with audience. Now it's not exactly overlap Twitter to LinkedIn, and we kind of reformatted a little bit for the LinkedIn platform and audience, but it's a high probability of doing well. And the reason that's important is because LinkedIn does not reward frequent posting in the way Twitter does. Like, if you tried to post on LinkedIn 10 times a day, I don't think that's going to go very well. But if you post a few times a week with content that you know does well on another platform, that's a great way to become more— to get more visibility on that platform if that's your goal.

My second question How do you— because you've separated your personal brand from the company brand. I've tried to keep them both synonymous with each other. I'd be curious why you separated your personal brand from your company brand.

Hmm, that's a great question. Um, I don't know that I have a great answer for that. I think it might be because, like what I was saying earlier, What I'm really interested in right now and what is engaging me intellectually and getting me excited is things that are relevant to other property management company owners, the problems that are coming up in our business and that I'm figuring out a way to solve and talking with other folks about how they're solving it and then sharing that. You know, that is not relevant to the audience of the property management company, who are trying to figure out how to get their home rented, right? So I think if I tried to become the personal brand face of that business, it just, that wouldn't sync up with who I actually am, like, in my heart. Now, there's also the angle that, you know, by becoming too entwined with my management company, I could be limiting the future options for that company. Right? Because if all the clients and all the tenants and everyone in the whole city knows that company as me, and it's all about me and what I'm doing, and all the clients want to talk to me and everything, right? That of course obviously makes it more difficult potentially to sell the business or even step away, you know, if everyone has my cell phone number or whatever. So there's— I think that's part of it too. I don't— I think some people have like an ego around their face and name with their business. Trust me, I've got ego problems around other things. That just isn't one of them. I would be perfectly happy to have someone else be the CEO and be the face of the business. Like, that's— that would be amazing, actually.

So Spencer's been trying to be CEO here for years.

I haven't gotten a promotion in like 7 years.

Yeah.

And as soon as you start doing something, we'll talk about promotions.

This corner office is my promotion.

Yeah. Well, you've got the AC in here.

I was about to say that's a perk.

Well, this is for podcast guests.

Well, for those of you who don't know, Peter and I have been hanging out in my office, which is about 20 degrees hotter, which is also a corner office, but it's got windows facing the front and apparently only one air conditioning vent, which I'm going to reroute one of these out of Spencer's back to mine.

When—

that's my next move.

You've already been up there.

I've already been up there trying to figure out logistics on rerouting that.

So Peter, let me ask you then, kind of switching to marketing for your company.

Mm-hmm.

How do you view marketing for your company? I can tell you're passionate about building your personal brand and talking about the things that you love to talk about, helping property management owners. Like, how do you think about those property owners who need to find your services in Columbus?

Yeah, so when I think about marketing a property management business, and I've got a blog post on this topic on my website, it's like 10 things I'd learned about marketing a property management business that a lot of people have gotten value out of, and it really covers the basics. I won't go over that here, but when I think about marketing, I think about inbound and outbound, right? And inbound is people who are calling your company or emailing your company saying, I'd like to learn more about your property management business. Right? And there's all kinds of ways to make that happen, right? You can do AdWords, you can do content marketing, you can have a great website that ranks highly, you can— right, there's, there's many, many strategies to how to make more people contact you and get inbound leads. So that has been an area of focus for me and my company for basically its whole existence, so 9 years, is how do we go from getting 1 lead a week to 2 leads a week? How do we go from getting 2 leads a week to 4 leads a week? And, and so on and so on and so forth. And like, you know, you're trying to figure out like, how much can I spend to get a lead, right? You're looking at like your ROI on that, your CAC versus your LTV, and there's all these fun acronyms you can get really into. It's kind of like a science. It's pretty cool, actually. So that's inbound. Um, so outbound is, is I think a very untapped, like, blue ocean in the world of property management, in the world of our companies, like small property management companies. If you look at, interestingly, commercial brokerage firms, big ones like Marcus Milchap and all these CBRE, these huge names, Think about what they're trying to do. So these big, big, big commercial brokerages, what do they want? They want listings. They want to sell the 250-unit apartment building downtown. They want to sell the 50,000-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of town. Do you think they're sitting around waiting for the owners of those companies, of those buildings, to email them and say, hi, I'd like to learn more about your brokerage service? Heck no, that doesn't work. They're out there doing outbound efforts all day long. That's literally all they're doing. And the way they do this is they hire young folks to call. It's like cold calling is the name of the game. They bring these folks in by the dozen and they train them how to— with scripts, how to talk on the phone to owners of these buildings. And they give them lists and they're like, you need to make 20 calls today. You need to make 30 calls today. You need to schedule 5 appointments this week. And that's like their whole business. They've become experts at this. And the reason it works for them is because the customer lifetime value of a property owner who has a 250-unit apartment building is massive. Massive. What, 6% of whatever, how many millions of dollars is you know, when that property sells, they can afford to employ these guys and gals on the phone for all these weeks and weeks and weeks and months sometimes until they even get one. Yeah, well, it turns out that we also have a very high customer lifetime value in the world of property management, particularly in multifamily. Now, not everyone manages multifamily, but if you would be willing to manage a 20-unit apartment building you should be willing to spend many, many, many thousands of dollars to win that client because the customer lifetime value of a 20-unit apartment building for property management is really, really big. So long way of saying, I think there's an opportunity to make outbound work for property management firms, and we are experimenting with a few different things. We've got a magazine that we're putting together right now. It's called Rent Magazine. And we are literally going to be mailing it in a FedEx envelope to a list of multifamily property owners in Columbus that we got from like the auditor's website. It's a long story about how you get these lists and it's kind of a dark art in and of itself. But if you have a list, I think we're going to find out. I think you can target that list with high-quality content marketing, not just a random postcard, black and white, boring. Call me, I want to manage your property, right? And then combine that with maybe some monthly webinars where you're sort of creating and sharing content relevant for property owners on these webinars. And you can get maybe some synergy between, you know, you promote the magazine on the webinar and the webinar on the magazine, and then all this works together to get you the emails. And it's all about getting these emails. Once you have the emails, now you can market to them through your traditional email marketing. Again, providing value, not just spamming and emailing them every other day saying, please let me, you know, manage your property, but actually providing you— you— it all starts from you need to honestly and truly in your heart, in your heart of hearts, care about them and their property and them being successful with their property. If you make it all about you and how you can make the most money, you're going to fail. You have to actually care about property owners being successful, whether or not that's with you managing the property. If that means that they're managing themselves and you can provide some content and some information and some tools that's valuable for them in that pursuit, you should be totally fine with that outcome. And if it turns out that they're a better fit for another management company and you can make that referral, you should be totally happy with that outcome. You have to actually feel that deep in your soul, or I think it's gonna come through that it's all about you and you just want, you know, to win the business.

Well, your content will all be, you'll just be pitching your services in all your content.

And you've said that about websites for a long time, that most websites you go to is all about them, right? Yeah, it's like a brochure. When the website really needs to be all about the person coming to the website.

Yeah.

And I think it's interesting, I've never heard it talked about inbound and outbound, but The way I think about it, or the way we think about it, is in two different avatars, right? You have who we call Susie and Steve, which is the one house, one owner. I would imagine they're more inbound, right? Like, we're not just cold calling random numbers, right? It would never— trying to find Susie and Steve. But when Susie and Steve are reaching out to go find a property manager, we want to be there. And then all of a sudden it becomes an inbound lead. The outbound really becomes, for us, what we call Mike and Mary avatar, which is You can find out how many of these people that own 10 to 20 rental houses, and then you could do outbound efforts to them. And then also it's about a relationship. You know, Mike and, Mike and Mary, who are avatars again for 10 to 20 house owners, it's not like they're going to watch a video and then all of a sudden come let you manage. Or if I have a small apartment community, I'm not just going to give them to you because, because I just reached out and you answered the phone. I mean, it really becomes more about relationships. And so meeting with investors on a consistent basis. That's kind of the outbound thing, showing up where they show up. And the good thing about investors is they do congregate. Heck, they congregate on social media all the time.

Do they? I don't know. I feel like—

Well, you talked about the real estate Twitter.

Yeah, the real estate Twitter, though, is like 0.0001% of like— there's like 2 people on real estate Twitter from Columbus. Like, it's just— there is a big community there, but it's very geographically spread out. I've always found it challenging Something I have found challenging about our industry is that I feel like it's really difficult to reach our customers. Like, if you're in a B2B business, say you're providing bookkeeping to small business owners. Well, small business owners are reachable. They have websites. They have LinkedIn pages that talk about their business. They have titles on LinkedIn that you can filter by, like CEO or founder. But people who own duplexes don't put that on their LinkedIn. They don't have a website. There's like, so yeah, you can go to real estate meetups and you can, there's certain groups, you know, on Facebook and LinkedIn maybe where you might be able to find some of them. But I do think it's a big challenge, which is why we're resorting to this elaborate magazine with this direct mail marketing lists and all this invest, investing tons of money in all this for this outbound effort. So yeah, it's, we'll see if it pays off, right? Because it's, you know, we're investing some serious money in this and if we get one client, right, that's not gonna cut it. We're gonna need to, but the thing with marketing is you have to do it for a while. Yeah. Before you really know.

I've always said the best marketers are very disciplined and you think in your mind, you think about marketing as creative and flashing the right image at the right time, and it's really not, especially when you're talking about kind of looping it back to Twitter or LinkedIn. It's not about posting one time and then all these followers are like, that's the most genius comment we've ever said. And then you rack up 10,000 followers. It's more about consistently putting out content and painting a picture of who you are and what you're passionate about.

And there's literally no correlation between the effort you put into a post and the traction it gets. Like the stuff that I've spent an hour creating a thread with a blog post and I go and do all this data research, put it up, this huge thing. And yeah, it gets like 5 likes. And then I think of something randomly when I'm at a stoplight picking up my daughter from daycare, like, wouldn't it be weird? And it gets like 500 likes and 50 retweets.

And yeah, it's the same. One of the things I've found about LinkedIn is anytime I post a picture of people, it gets more, for whatever reason, it gets more. So, I'm always posting pictures. In fact, we're gonna do this right after this. I'm always posting pictures of people that I'm with. So, if I'm somewhere and I'm with somebody on the team, take a selfie or get somebody to take a picture and then post that. And I'm telling you, it gets way more interesting.

Yeah. And that's the type of thing where you have to devote time and effort to a platform to learn it, to learn the ins and outs. Weird stuff with Twitter. Twitter, I've noticed if I have like a screenshot of text, it'll do better than if I like type the text out in the tweet. It's like the dumbest thing because it's the same content, but like something about a screenshot, people are like, ooh, I wonder like if maybe it's secret or something. Yeah.

Oh my God, he stole this. Right. The thing I've tried on Twitter and I've seen other people do this, like Adam Grant, I think, does this where he tweets, takes a screenshot of the tweet, and then posts that screenshot to LinkedIn and then comments about the tweet, and he gets a lot of traction. Now, he has a bigger brand than I do, so maybe it works better for him. Well, this has been awesome. I mean, partly because Spencer's mic ran out of batteries. I mean, this has been the greatest podcast ever. I don't even know if Spencer's going to be on this podcast.

We'll just clip that whole track from the— Yeah.

Cut them out. Now, this has been great, Peter. In fact, I told you I wanted to talk about two different things. I wanted to also talk about operations with you, but we spent most of the time on marketing and on social media. I think if people would invest the time, and again, look, this is not— You told me it's taken you 18 months to build a brand on Twitter, and a lot, not just 18 months of linear time, but a lot of time, energy, and effort pouring into providing valuable content. But if somebody will do that, I think it will have long-lasting value. And I've been trying to get a member of our team, which I expressed to you, you can be the thought leader in this one piece of this Twitter world. And if you'll do that, then it'll make you a lot of money. And so, somebody sitting out there that's listening to this now, maybe last question I would say is, if you were just getting started back on Twitter, How would you approach it today? Maybe some things you did wrong, how would you approach it differently knowing what you know now?

Well, there's kind of two sides to this coin. The one side is it sounds like a lot of work the way you describe it, like, well, 18 months of effort, and the reality is it really wasn't that much.

Well, I don't want people to do it.

I'm gonna do it. We'll take all the advantages. Yes, exactly. Well, it honestly, it wasn't that much work because a lot of times it'll just be like something I randomly think of. I'll just tweet it. And if it doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't go anywhere. Big deal. It's not like I'm getting like punished for it. Like it's not like I'm getting a slap on the wrist if it doesn't get any likes. And I actually have found that the type of like randomly I'll think of something and I'll go to text my business partner like, hey, what's the deal? Like, Did you see this thing? You know, or whatever it is, that type of short, quick content of information sharing or question does really well on Twitter. So the type of thing that I would text my business partner, and sometimes I literally will both text him and post it to Twitter at the same time, that's, it turns out, what works really well on that platform. So that's literally like no extra work to do that. Or when you just think of something and you just tweet it. You just ask the people on Twitter and see what they think, right? And that's like a really quick and easy way to start. The other side of that coin is if you decide to get serious and you acknowledge the value and you want to do it and you want to grow your following, to put it really bluntly, You have to be consistent, and I would set some metric for yourself of like 2 times every weekday or 5 times, you know, whatever it is, 7 times a week or something, and just consistently do that. And if you do that over time, the feedback mechanisms that are present in all these platforms, which is you're going to see how many likes and impressions and favorites you're getting your brain is naturally gonna kind of reorient itself around producing the type of content that's gonna do well. Now there's arguments to be made whether that's a good thing for your brain or not.

But it creates a habit, right? Yeah. It creates a habit whether that's good or bad.

Yeah, but your brain is perfectly set up for this type of task, which is like you give some output and then you get feedback on what worked and what didn't. Your brain is really good at like channeling that information and like learning. So I think if you make that effort, if you're willing to commit to that, and look, it's not all about Twitter, right? This could be LinkedIn, this could be Instagram, this could be Facebook, there's a— this could even be writing blogs or email newsletters, but the same thing I think applies. Frequency of effort is really important. I think a lot of people get hung up on this idea that it has to be perfect. I'm not going to publish a blog post unless it's incredible, and I'm not going to write on LinkedIn unless I have the best news ever to share, like I got a brand new job, right? But it does— you don't— it's not— that's not what it's about. And in fact, sharing your failures and your learnings along the way makes you more real. It makes you more authentic, and people connect with that. So don't feel like it has to be perfect for you to start. That's awesome advice.

Peter, I appreciate you coming. Peter's a great follow, obviously, on Twitter and on LinkedIn, so anybody that's listening needs to do that. And anybody that's listening, please, please, please subscribe if you found this helpful. We have guests on the show. Spencer and I will just riff on some property management-related subject. And so if you found this content helpful, I hope you'll subscribe. Also, if you found the content helpful, I hope you'll leave us a review. Spencer and I have really shallow egos, and we need as many 5-star reviews as possible. So appreciate it, and we will see y'all again next time.