The Worst Marketing Mistake You Can Make with Jordan Muela

Most people have a desire to have a really meaningful, heart-centered connection with their life's purpose, but lack the courage or the encouragement to figure out what that is. And if I can advocate for them to find what that is, whether or not it's at my company or at another company, everybody wins.

Welcome to Season 4 of Peter Lohmann's podcast. This podcast is a show about all things residential property management, from property operations to sales and marketing to growing and managing your team. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder of RL Property Management. For season 4, I have an exciting new guest each week. We go deep into conversation about problems facing professional property managers and the best ways to overcome them.

Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. We are here with Jordan Muela, second time on the show. You might be my first ever repeat guest. I'll have to go check the records on that. Thanks for being here, Jordan.

Yeah, man. Honored to be here. Glad to do it again. Chop it up.

Yeah.

So I think most of my listeners are probably familiar with you, so I want to skip the background backstory.. If you're interested in hearing more about that, you should go back and listen to the first episode with Jordan in season 2. Jordan, I've got a list of exciting discussion topics here today. We got all kinds of good stuff. I want to get into it with you. Let's start with Profit Coach. So you recently announced that you exited Profit Coach, meaning you sold your shares. You were, you were a co-founder there. You did a great episode sharing more about that if folks are curious, but I wanted to sort of put you on the other side of the mic and it's been a couple months now. How's it, how's it sitting? How are you feeling post-exit from that business?

Yeah, I'm feeling great. I'm feeling really happy about where everything landed for everybody, for the, the time back for me to refocus and be all in with LeadSimple. I'm feeling great for the new leadership that's come into Profit Coach, seeing what Brad is able to create, leaning in there, getting his feet wet, standing up something new, seeing the creative energy that Danny has, having that day-to-day leadership support and what it frees him up to do around his unique contribution. It's definitely feeling like a decided win-win. I wouldn't expect in general a transaction to be that simpler, straightforwardly of a slam dunk, but in this case it was.

Got it. And for the last couple of years, what was the level of your involvement there? Were you attending the leadership offsites? Did you have any day-to-day responsibilities, anything like that?

Day-to-day responsibilities were very light. I handled some mastermind groups, some webinars. Outside of that, it was really quarterly meetings that I was attending, and those quarterly meetings can add up. You're flying somewhere, it's a couple day commitment, good use of time, you know, functional necessary, but it was also meaningful time savings to reapportion.

Got it. And why now? Like what, what changed that made you decide this was the time to really go all in on LeadSimple? Because I think if I remember right, Profit Coach was kind of the last holdout in a sense. Of businesses that you had started or become involved with other than LeadSimple, and you've spoken publicly like, all right, we're all in on LeadSimple now. This is the, this is the main thing. This is the one thing. But why not 2 years ago? Why not a year from now? Like what made, what made this the right time?

I think for me it was wanting to support Profit Coach through a couple of transitions. And also make space for one more transition that was needed. Brad coming on, bringing in a new partner, that was the thing that was the tipping point. It was the perfect timing of that needing to happen. Me stepping out, that switch just worked really well. It freed up equity on the cap table to make that happen. And that desire for bringing in a new leader had been there for a minute, but as with all things, these things take time and it took a minute to find the perfect candidate to make that swap out. Once it did and they were there, the timing was just optimal.

Got it. Okay. Awesome. Let's stay on LeadSimple for a bit. I want to hear a little bit about Inbox. So it's by the time this comes out, Inbox will be like a new version is being released. That's being prepared right now and will be out.

Yeah.

By the time this gets released, it's got a really nice visual overhaul and some other quality of life improvements and bug fixes and The team's been doing an awesome job there. What was kind of the philosophy there on turning attention back to inbox and making that really a major focus of the company over the last quarter or two?

Well, we knew that there was a lot of room for improvement with the product overall and that it was a really interesting problem space that has a lot of value. So much of property management is comms. So to contextualize those comms by relating them to the relevant workflows, properties, contacts, all of that stuff is just kind of a no-brainer. And it was always our vision to have a deep integration between those two things. It's taken a minute for us to be able to execute at the level required for— to play in that space, which is to say, when we went from CRM to workflow to inbox, one of the things that it took a minute to really fully wrap our heads around was the implicit expectations in each one of those categories. People's expectation with a CRM globally tend to be lower than their expectations with an email client, specifically in the areas of performance. For example, with the CRM, you click on something that's a little, it's a little janky, not optimal, but probably not going to ruin your day. If there's something in your inbox that is not working perfectly, it is a big deal because you're going to be, you're using it all day, repetitive motion. So the quality standards, the performance needs, and the baseline comparison in the category of email, the baseline comparison is against other billion-dollar companies that have really mature products like Gmail, Outlook, etc. So we knew that we needed to retrench our efforts there and really get it right. And this is really just a reflection of taking more time to hone and refine and chisel off all of the rough edges and kind of reimagine it.

Got it. So I'm not super familiar with Help Scout or some of the other ticketing systems, I guess they're called, in the space. A lot of these were built more for software companies to use. It's interesting that we're sort of bringing that into the home services world. Think of property management as being a home service in a way. When I think about inbox, you, and you mentioned it, like You, you basically rebuilt email within LeadSimple and provided a bunch of other context and functionality that's useful for property managers. When you, when you think about the product, like how much of it is angled toward ticketing or like handling support tickets? Like I know you guys use a support ticketing system internally at LeadSimple. I'm, I'm very interested in. Property management in terms of like trying to think of it more and more like a software business and like there's a lot of parallels with SaaS, right? And one of the things I think software companies do really well is they're super clear on like support being separate from operations and product and sales and marketing. So you had to make some decisions when you were building Inbox around about like how much is this gonna be like a ticket-taking system and how much is this going to be like a shared inbox? Because I think they're subtly different. What am I not understanding there? What would be your reflection on that?

Yeah, so there is some nuance there and it is somewhat fine. Ticketing systems, a ticket by definition is an object. It's something that has a code. Think like a 5-digit numeric code assigned to that one specific ticket so you can identify it. A shared inbox does not, or an email client in general, does not necessarily have that same implicit commitment. They are all oriented around making sure that there's continuity of conversations. So the difference with a ticketing system versus something else is that with the ticketing system, you have a, a coherent way of mapping a group of conversations back to one specific ticket if, if necessary. The downside of that is that it feels like a ticketing system, which can feel a little bit more clinical, a little more sterile at times. So I don't know there's any right or wrong answer here, but our general orientation has been around driving effective communications and making sure that there's visibility into what conversations are or are not happening. That's the implicit goal of a shared inbox. You have a team member that's on vacation. Underperforming, having a bad day, confused, and you can see whether or not emails are or are not getting replied to. And that visibility is something we find is frequently missing in a lot of operations where you're just implicitly trusting that people are doing good follow-up, but you fundamentally have no way of auditing without going through a lot of hand-wringing to do Google permissions and log into people's inboxes, et Yeah, like not, not every external communication is a support ticket, but every support ticket is external communication.

And I do think Inbox has done a great job straddling that. There's some ticketing language in the product, like open, close conversation, things like that. And my team seems to get a lot of value out of the way it's been structured, the way it's been thought out. We have multiple shared inboxes, we have different team members assigned to different inboxes, and it all feels very like they picked it up very quickly. So yeah, I appreciate that clarity and I think that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, we're piggybacking off of the existing conventions of email as much as possible, just the basic common sense, because on the client's end, these distinctions are worthless, right? All of these distinctions are meaningless to the owner and the tenant. They just want to have their situation answered. So we want as little forethought required and as little jump of mental frame for them to come to us as opposed to us going to them in the context and the medium that they're used to.

Yeah, property management really occupies this awkward space between local Main Street small business and larger professional company. A perfect example of this is like when you go to your auto mechanic and you call with a question, you wouldn't expect to get an email back that's like, you, a support ticket 456 has been opened and we, we will be replying within 5 minutes. Right. That would be insane for like a local auto mechanic to like assign you support tickets every time you call them with a question. But at the same time, if you call Chase Bank or, you know, ABC large software company, Amazon, you are going to get those emails with the ticket number and the auto-reply and like it all, like you said, clinical, it feels clinical. Property management is in this weird kind of space in the middle where the bigger firms are trying to move in the direction of being a bigger company. They're, they've, they're becoming departmentalized, they're becoming larger, multi-state, they're, they're centralizing back office operations. And there's a temptation to move in that direction of like, no, yeah, like everything's a support ticket. Like if you want to contact your property manager, you can't just call their cell phone. Like, You need to call the main line and then you'll be routed the right thing. And if you email, it's like one central email and you get assigned a ticket so we can track it. And I think the industry is trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in that scope of local small Main Street business to Chase Bank. And I don't know, it's like, I'm very interested in that. Like, what, what are the customers' expectations? What are the resident owners expecting when they call or email a property manager?

Yeah, we're building for the mass market. We're building for the ways in which we anticipate owners and tenants behaving. I think that it's awesome in situations where you can get people to map towards you, and there's some limited instances where you can and should expect that policy issues where the tenant and the owner need to comply, and if they do not comply, we will not be accommodating them. There, there are a minority of issues where that is a totally sane and coherent stance to take. There's a lot of other issues where it's a hill that's not worth dying on. So expecting that you will never be contacted in any other format than via email at your preferred email address is not a realistic expectation. So then the question is, what do you do with all of those other comms that inevitably come through other channels. Our point of view is that we should be accommodating them and we're working towards sucking up as many of those comms as possible. That's the long-term goal for us because in my mind, that's going to be the reality long-term.

Couldn't agree more, right? I mean, and as part of this release, you've improved support for like individual email accounts so you can operate your individual account out of inbox. And then if you do get an email from a customer, you can reassign it to the correct inbox. Assign it to the right person. And of course, customers are also contacting us via text message and phone calls. And I know that support has been added and is increasing within Inbox. And that's exactly how I think about it. Like, to a certain extent, we do need to accommodate our, our customers and how they prefer to communicate. But that doesn't mean we can't centralize it all on our side and have a coherent single stream that we can look at to reference and get context.

Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by RentScale. Listen guys, RentScale kind of gave me free rein here. Normally advertisers provide me with a script, but they said, you know what, Peter, use your own discretion, use your imagination. So what I want to tell you about is on my journey from 0 to 650 units, there's been a lot of things I've done in my business that have helped us grow and helped us scale, helped us reach our goals faster. There's been nothing more impactful to me reaching my goals as a business owner than engaging RentScale to help me find, train, and onboard salespeople to help close more doors. And I don't say that lightly. I've hired 2 different BDMs with RentScale. They've helped me find them. They've helped me interview them, they help onboard, and they provide ongoing training and support. And I am not exaggerating when I say that is the most impactful thing that I've done in my business ever. If I had not hired that first salesperson with them, I think I would still be in a totally different place as a business owner. And, um, I just— for that reason alone, if you don't reach out contact them, that's on you. Because if you're still doing sales on your own or you're, you've settled for a salesperson who you know is not performing the way they should be, RentScale is who you need to talk to. So please, I implore you, give them a call, chat with them, and find out how they can help you achieve your business goals.

Sticking with LeadSimple here for a bit, I want to ask about how you think about competition. So LeadSimple has competition from within the industry and from without. Some of those competitors are making moves, they're making news, they're adding features. What comes up for you when, when you see that?

I think competition in general in the market is good. Any kind of innovation, anybody that wants to serve the customer is a friend of mine and somebody that I support. I'm for seeing the industry advance in ways that are useful and material. And I don't pretend to think that LeadSimple has the exclusive exclusive rights or grip on all of those ideas. So I think it's generally positive and we pay attention, we tune in, we see what folks are up to. Ultimately, we're playing our game and we're focused on executing our vision for the industry. And to the extent that other people are doing that in parallel, it's to be expected.

That's a, that's a really, I've got a couple friends who would, who would've answered that question very differently. I've got one friend of mine in particular who, who's in the underdog position in his space, and he is aggressive in going after his competitors. He blasts them on Twitter. He digs into their job postings. He's kind of watching their every move and trying to undercut them on pricing. And this is just like very much I would say playing to win. It's not that you're not playing to win and maybe the dynamics are different because he's coming from, he's like the startup guy going after like the more established incumbents. I don't think that's true for LeadSimple, but your, your response strikes me as being way more kind of like Zen. It's like, it like, that was a great line where you said anyone who's trying to serve the customer is a friend of mine. Like that would not be a line that would come out of the friend I have in mind. How did you come to that perspective? Was there a time when you would've been way more trash talking, aggressive, stressed about competitors, or is this just something that you always were like, nah, man, like, this is cool. We're all, we're all trying to do the same thing. Like, these are my people.

Yeah. I mean, you're also, it's also like a minute by minute thing, right? I mean, you know, catch me, catch me tomorrow. My answer may be, may be different. Zen is something to Yeah, Zen is something to hold for moment by moment. I think my general orientation here is just taking a long-term view of value creation. I've been here for a minute. I'm not going anywhere. And when you take that longer-term time horizon of value creation, you realize a couple of things. Number one, it's hard to create value. It's very difficult, so much more difficult than it seems, and to do it for a sustained month after month, year after year is even harder. And there are so few people that are up for that, that are up for creating sustained value. The quick hit, the short-term play, the spam people, let me get some customers. That stuff is so much more common. So I don't experience that invitation of orienting and committing to long-term value. As being the same thing as like inviting a bunch of competitors in. I just in general don't experience people to have a lot of appetite for that. For those that do, I have a lot of respect for it. When I, when I look around the industry and I see other people that have been here and committed to benefiting in the industry in a way that is separate from what benefits me, like they obviously intersect, but they are fundamentally separate things. The industry and what it needs is distinct from me and what I need. I'm trying to create as much alignment and overlap as possible, but when you take that long-term time horizon, there's a, like, you're looking around for people who want to help and lean in and shovel dirt. So that's, that's, I think, what informs it is just being very open-minded about anybody. I think, honestly, it feels like running a volunteer organization. That's what it feels like. It's like, brother, if you want to volunteer, we don't need to be friends. I don't need to get along. I don't even need to like you. Like, if you want to volunteer, like, thank God. Thank God.

Yeah, that's, that's so true. The industry has come such a long way, I would say, in the last 5 to 8 years, but also lots of opportunities remain. I would say along those lines, what, what's, what's LeadSimple's BHAG? What's, what's your big hairy audacious goal with LeadSimple? Got 3 outstanding products that we use heavily day in and day out. Where, where are you headed over the next 5 to 10 years?

Yeah, our goal really is to become the place where work happens in the industry. So when you're thinking about just doing day-to-day work, that leads to the obvious orientation to kick off a process, to send out an email, to facilitate a conversation, to set up a new form that triggers X, Y, Z. That default orientation of LeadSimple being where the vast majority of work happens with a couple of nominal exceptions, that is, that is what we're aiming at. And that feels both exciting to me and also like a tall mountain to climb.

What comes up for you as like the next obvious step in the direction of, of crafting LeadSimple such that it's the place where work happens, where work gets done?

Well, there's a couple of different dimensions upon which we can explore it. You can explore it in terms of use cases. LeadSimple has been built as a platform. It's a series of capabilities and competencies that are— have property management in mind, but also transcend property management. As an example, we use LeadSimple for our hiring process. We get around 10,000 applications a quarter., and we process those applications. And the only way we're able to process those applications is running them through LeadSimple. What does that have to do with property management?

Nothing.

But the system was constructed in such a way that, that and a variety of other processes can be executed within it. So we built it with platform in mind. As you go deeper into a specific process, process-specific affordances appear and are necessary. And you can just imagine everything from the delinquencies process to the, owner onboarding process. Each of these have things you could do that would meaningfully benefit that process, but potentially benefit no other processes. And so you have to make decisions about where— what kind of affordances are necessary, what is a distraction. So we sift through and we have those use case related conversations, and we also have conversations related to things that we could do, but are not— the juice isn't worth the squeeze. We're not going to be world-class. And there's a complementing peer in the form of an integration that would be best suited for that. And there's a lot of integration opportunities out there. We have not even really begun to fully explore that. We have integrations with 5 property accounting software vendors right now, but there are so many more integration possibilities. And I'm really excited about that because that means that we extend functionality, we bring more data into the system that allows for triggering off and kicking off more processes, more automations. So the next step that I see right now looks like developing a deeper connection between process and communication, and leveraging the data coming in from other systems to deepen those connections to improve the quality of what's happening and to save time along the way.

As I've gotten to learn more about the software space, SaaS companies, right, from, from being closely aligned and integrated into LeadSimple and watching how you guys work, I didn't have an appreciation for how difficult the product role is. And by that, I mean, what do you build next and what should it look like? To, I think like to the lay user, it appears obvious. Well, of course they should do this next. Like, obviously, like, how is that not already done?

Right?

But if you were to sample 100 users, all of those quote obvious answers would be different. And even if there was a consensus, it's not even necessarily the correct next move for the product. And so I have like this newfound appreciation for people who have strong intuition and opinions about No, this is the direction we're going and here's why. And even though the customers aren't asking for the Model T, they're asking for a faster horse. Like, I'm a believer in what's going to become possible once they see it. And I, and that strikes me as having been like, that's the origin story of LeadSimple. I like, I, it's not clear to me that anyone was asking for workflow automation in the style that now exists. Other than like me and like 3 other people.

I literally talked to you like, yeah, I remember where I was talking to you about it years ago. But yeah, in general, there was not some blueprint of, you know, there was not a petition people were handing around indicating somebody should build workflow software.

It was definitely— yeah. And so I think like just an appreciation for people who have an instinctual, instinctual skill of like, okay, this is like, let me look through the fog here, like the fog of war if you've ever played Civilization and like, let me see what the, what the territory looks like where I can't really see it. Let me make a guess. And then we're going to build a product around that. And what's interesting is when I think about how that relates to property management, we faced a similar thing with our residents and with our owners.

Property management is a product.

We don't really think of it that way, but we've constructed a product and we sell it and it has certain features and certain things that we will do and certain things that we won't do for our owners. Those are outlined in the property management agreement rather than taking the form of like software features that you can use or that don't exist. And I do think that property managers have a tendency to fall back on What the people are asking for, like what my residents are asking for, what my owners are asking for. And that's like the quote features I'm going to build next, or to translate it, it's like, that's what I'm going to support, or that's what I'm going to allow. So like, as you reflect on these product decisions that have been made at LeadSimple over the years, is there any advice that you could share with professional property managers on how to develop some instincts around relating to customers in this way? Like how can we, how do we start to build a sense of intuition around where to go with our product offerings as property managers?

I'm taking notes here. Yeah, that was great. I love that intersection. A couple of things come to mind. One is just pick. The idea of knowing is burdensome. The idea it's an intellectual Rubik's Cube is heavy. It typically isn't. What matters more is picking something, being high conviction, and being— getting feedback. Like, if you're in the market and you're collecting feedback, then you can rely upon speed. Pick something, go after it. Did it work? Course correct. That's way more important than needing to have the genius intellectualized perfect idea of exactly what people want. Just prioritize speed and getting feedback. The other idea of not what they are asking for, but what they need, that takes me to being a student of what your client needs in a way that is different than just taking at face value what you're being told. If you can take what you're being told and pull out the meta of it, if you can, if you can get playful with it, if you can talk to enough clients, find the common patterns, the common buckets that those fall into, and relate them into a kind of an abstracted hierarchy of priorities, then you're able to serve the client at a deeper level. You're able to translate that irrational request that makes no sense and put it in a bucket so that even when it's stated in a way that is unhelpful, you can still relate it to a broader frame that you have. So for example, when I think about serving my clients, I think about my client's client. That's been really clarifying for me. If I just thought about what property managers told me they want, I'd be missing something. Thinking about what the owner wants as a kind of a North Star thing to aim at and believing that the property managers interests, wants, and desires necessarily intersect, that works well for me. They won't necessarily intersect. There are some potential deviations, but in general, I'm trying to build for the clients that want to align with, with outcomes that benefit things for the owner. So that's an example of like me kind of looking past the first line of conversation.

Love that. Couple things came up for me. One, you've identified that your customer's customer, the pro— the property owner, is, is an area of interest for you. And if you, if you get clear on what the property owner wants, that will help inform how to better support your customer, the property manager. What's interesting though is that we have another customer and that's the resident and other vendors in our space. Have chosen to become very interested in what the resident wants and then have helped property managers deliver that. Right. And so it's interesting to me, and I, I happen to go more your direction, which is I'm much more interested in what the owner wants and aligning with that than what the resident wants. I don't think it's necessarily right or wrong one way or the other, but that, that kind of struck me.

I thought that was interesting. I, I, I have a com— I have a comment on that. My, my orientation there is that that's just a function of orientation. So for the folks that are effectively making the tenant their customer by focusing on drawing revenue from the tenant, it would make sense that that focus on resident experience would be commensurate in proportion to the level of aspiration ambition that you have for extracting revenue from the tenant.

And the sort of what you articulated about the property owner's interests and supporting the property manager in that context, is it sort of implied then that LeadSimple is basically all in on third-party managers? In other words, like if you think about a REIT or like a large institutional where the, the, the client, your, your customer owns all the units and there is no third party. How interested is LeadSimple in providing solutions for that group of people?

Yeah, I mean, it's a secondary priority, the third-party property management for sure, but it's in many ways there's, I mean, in a lot of ways, as you know, there's a lot of simplicity there. So I think a lot of how I think about that is that arguably it should be easier for us to create value for folks in those scenarios. So there's interest, but third-party property management, that's our bread and butter and what we are prioritizing our efforts around.

Got it.

So the other thing that came up for me with your answer earlier is you mentioned sort of in thinking about what to build next, get close with your customers, spend time with them, and then kind of trust your instincts. Don't just listen to their answers, but, but go deeper. A prerequisite for that is spending a lot of time with your customers. And this is something where I really, I look at the vendors in our space, especially LeadSimple, and I'm fascinated. So what I mean by that is you're at all the property management conferences, not the SaaS conferences. I'm a property manager. I go to property management conferences. You're a SaaS company. You go to SaaS conferences. No, you don't. You go to your customers' conferences. So does that mean then, or, or what would happen then if property managers started going to real estate investor conferences instead of NARPM conferences? And like when I think about you, Jordan, you spend more time with property managers, I think almost than, than other SaaS founders. Like, I know you're in— I think you're in Hampton, and I know you, you went to— you guys went to a SaaS conference like a couple years ago. But that like really strikes me.

I think there's something there. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's a sales and marketing motion built in, so there is like some— a very practical motion of what's happening. I do go to SaaS events from time to time, and I find great commonality with other vertical SaaS founders. I don't talk about this a lot, but I have a deep conviction that vertical SaaS is very common from vertical to vertical, and it typically looks like this. 20 years ago, there was somebody that came along and found a really juicy, juicy transactional revenue opportunity. In our case, for example, that would be rent payment processing. And they built a software suite as a way to wrap around and defend the transactional revenue, which is still the core of the property accounting software business. It's 70%+ of where revenue comes from. And along the way, workflow functionality was kind of extended to maintain that grip, and it's gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. It's more protectionist in nature, and over time, Eventually, that wave of SaaS players has crashed along the rocks enough to loosen things up. And there's a ton of players that have come into the space right now. That protectionist impulse has been broken. API walls have been broken up. It's not perfect, but it's kind of an inevitability that has played out in a bunch of industries. So I actually have gotten a fair bit of benefit from talking to other vertical SaaS founders that are They're selling to SMBs. Selling to SMBs is— that's the commonality, the common language in conversation that I can have with another SaaS founder where there's a lot of— yeah, there's a lot of connection. But in general, knowing my domain and knowing my expertise, I mean, that's where I get paid. Being in the industry and knowing it better than anybody else, that's what means that the greatest SaaS founder in another vertical can't like just come in here and displace me. I've— I have a level of connection and rapport and context that is— there's this question in software around advantage and what is defensible and what can you do that your competitors can't. And it's, it's a really challenging exercise because in general, the answer is like, well, if Amazon wanted to come into your space, they could do everything you are currently doing within what, you know, 6 months if you just reduce it down to money. It's hard to think of anything, any advantage that can't be repeated. But that context, that knowledge, that relationship, the time, the patina on it, that is hard to emulate. And therefore it's something worth continuing to invest in and defend.

Today's episode is brought to you by Citizen Home Solutions. Heading into my recent move, I thought I had everything taken care of. What I wasn't prepared for was how how tricky setting up utilities would be. You've probably experienced this too, and so have your residents. I wish I had used Citizen Home Solutions. They specialize in simplifying the setup process by removing all the guesswork, providing accurate and timely utility and service information. With over 8 years in business, they are the experts and serve as an extension of your property management team. What sets Citizen Home Solutions apart is their consultative approach. In addition to setting up services, they also evaluate residents' current bills to find the best possible options and potential cost savings as well. With a range of flexible options, residents can manage the setup of their utilities online through Citizen's dedicated resident portal, over the phone with a Citizen expert, or independently. The choice is theirs. Citizen provides a co-branded, user-friendly platform where residents can review utilities and services, upload documentation, and monitor the status of their setups. Transparency, accuracy, and service ready for move-in. Property managers benefit too. Citizen compensates property managers when their residents sign up and at no cost to the property manager. You'll have access to a comprehensive dashboard that provides detailed utility documentation, reporting, and full transparency into all resident accounts. Citizen Home Solutions provide residents expert guidance. So they don't have to navigate tricky utility setups alone. This service is invaluable to both you and your residents and ensures a smoother moving experience. Thanks again to Citizen for sponsoring today's episode.

No one could argue that, that you, Jordan Moeller, have a great advantage in our space. One of the ways that that's come about is through your podcast. You've been podcasting long before I got started. You know, listening to your show was part of the inspiration for a lot of things in my life, one of which was starting my own podcast. And you did mention recently that you've been feeling a little bit of a rut creatively in your latest newsletter. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. What's changed for you and what are some of the ideas that you're kind of rolling around in your head in terms of where to go next with that?

Ah, that's great. I love that you're asking me about this. Yeah, maybe it's like 100-episode increments because after the first 100 episodes, I took a break, and I've just shipped another 100 episodes, and I'm feeling a break. I think it's probably the format, needing to rework and change up the format. I had a lot of conversations in that one specific format, and that is just one of a million different formats. When I deviate, anytime I deviate from the format, I have a great time. Solo pods, are fun. Group pods are fun. Themed pods, like we did a Hot Ones episode one time, which is a ton of fun. So I think that's what's wanted and needed right now is just really reorienting around what set of conversations are fun and enjoyable for me. I recently listened to a Tim Ferriss interview where the decent portion of it was on podcasting. And he reiterated that common wisdom, which I've told people before and yet needed to hear again myself, is that in order to maintain stamina, it has to be something you enjoy, something you feel some heart connection with. And I was lagging doing the same thing over and over and over again. And my next jump in iteration will just be prioritizing that. What are conversations that light me up and I'm just excited to do it?

Yeah, well, I look forward to you sort of uncovering that and maybe, maybe experimenting with different formats. I've had the same, some of the same thoughts. I'm not to that same level of like, we haven't hit our first 100 episodes, but you know, nevertheless, I've done 4 seasons of kind of an interview style and, and I do think there is something to be said for switching it up, right? I love your solo episodes, by the way. For anyone who hasn't heard Jordan go on a rant, uh, on his podcast by himself for 20 minutes. It's, it's quite a journey. Go back and dig up some of those. My favorite one is the one called Leads. Leads are not a growth strategy. I'm actually gonna ask you about that later, but yeah. And the interview style show is the default, right? That's like super common, especially in the business world. It's straightforward. It's, I don't wanna say it's easy, but it, it's It doesn't require any crazy technical skills or prep work, or like you're, you're just getting together with somebody and asking some questions. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm excited to see what's next for the Profitable Property Management Podcast, Jordan. So, so I want to do like a hypothetical here. So gun to your head, you're forced to open a residential property management company. Okay. And just run of the mill, you're, you're going to be managing single-family rentals in, you know, middle America. What are some of the unconventional decisions that you would make about the company's structure, the customer profile that you would go after, and the tech stack?

Well, I would start off with branding. I would start with distinct branding that doesn't fit, feels out of place, necessitates attention, and is polarizing in some way.

That would be step one. So I'm thinking like Wella Property Management with like a house logo.

Is that—

Am I getting that right? Exactly the opposite of what I had. Oh, okay. What I had in mind, you know, mascot, colors, personality, and a meaningful implicit promise. And, you know, I'm not going to freestyle any further than that, but I would definitely start with branding, recognizing that the brand always transcends the service. It— there'll always be separate. Ultimately, your reputation will be defined by the quality of the service. But that brand identity is a blank slate and you can paint and create whatever you want. So why not create something really advantaged rather than something average? The other items they asked me about— customer profile. I would focus on the customers that were ideal, the customers that I wanted to serve, and just spitballing, making stuff up here. Would be a function of the market that I was in. But in most places in America, presumably I'm going to be targeting the accidental landlord or somebody that owns a couple of houses, you know, 0 to 10 houses, not dealing with institutions. And then segmenting beyond that, presumably dealing with folks like, you know, I just come up with a simple matrix of like, Questions to screen to make sure that this person actually wanted to hire a property manager, not that they felt forced to, but they actually were excited about deferring to my expertise. And that would be my commitment is to cultivate expertise. And if you don't want expertise, if you just want to glorify gopher, find somebody else and then set up a referral relationship. Tech stack, best of breed. Off-the-shelf software. I'd go with whatever sets of software feel like— felt like that they were going to be most relevant at the time. But that probably looks like starting off with a combination of picking a property accounting software that is going to be enough to get the job done in the early days. Doesn't have to be anything crazy. And then working my way into the more nuanced pieces of tech, slowly migrating over to something like a LeadSimple, a PropertyMeld, whatever the job feels wanted and needed. I can't say that that's probably the thing I would be most opinionated about. I feel like a lot of people have a conception of the basic tech stack you should be using that doesn't honestly strike me as like immediate advantage as long as you are actually taking good use of it. And the last thing of how to structure the company. Oh, what comes to mind for structuring? The first thing is hiring somebody that was really competent from day one and maybe a bit more competent than I needed rather than hiring the cheapest folks that are lower on the competence ladder and working my way up, knowing myself and my ambitions. I would want to grow this thing. I would hire somebody at a more senior position and ask them to help me build, particularly knowing my disposition and more of a visionary capacity. I would hire some kind of a GM, operations head, president, something like that, and ask them to help me build it rather than me building everything out at the lowest level from them. Now that, that's a somewhat privileged position as a function of cash flow. And so I'm making some assumptions, but assuming I had the means, by all means, that's what I would, I would be aiming at.

Got it. I like a lot of that. And I do think the idea of starting with a president or a COO or a high-level exec and then having them build out the team underneath them, like that is very attractive to me. These days. And you're right, like I wouldn't have been able to do that starting out because I, first of all, I wouldn't have even known like how to hire somebody like that, even if I could have afforded it. That is like definitely the trend as I've gotten more and more experienced in business and gotten a few resources is I'm not going to build this from the ground up. I'm going to start at the top and then make, hold this person accountable for building out the function underneath themselves. And I think that's a journey that everyone has to go on, like, because you can't start there if you've no experience in business. You just, you wouldn't even know like how to screen or interview somebody like that or where to find them.

That's true. Yeah, that's true. It's not, it's not on the menu. A lot of what that comes down to is just belief that it's possible. It's, it's like low-key depressing to me to see how consistently belief is a really material input in business. You have an idea, you read something, this axiom, Steve Jobs tells you it's true, but you doubt it. You're not sure. And then you experience it afterwards and you're like, ah, if I had just believed that and taken that to heart previously, I didn't actually have to have a 2x4 hit me in the head. And yet that's kind of how life works.

Okay, awesome. So I've got another hypothetical along these same lines. So let's pretend that this has worked. You've, you've started, you know, Lemon or whatever. You're, you're gonna make up some name for this company. It's gonna have a funny logo and then be all bold and splashy. And you hire, you hire your, your president and he builds it out and you get all the way up to 250 doors. So you've got a great BDM and they're, and they're closing doors, right? Problem is they're starting to go hungry. Your BDM, she's calling you up. Listen, Jordan, I don't have enough to do, man. I, I'm closing, you know, 40% of the leads come in, but there's just not enough leads. So I got a couple of questions for this scenario. What's the worst thing you could do in this situation? What's the thing that most property managers would do? Like, what's the average move here? And then what is the move? What is the best possible response when your BDM calls you up and says, I don't have enough lead flow?

Worst thing you can do is mindlessly swipe the credit card and try and use money to solve the problem. In some cases, that'll work. If you've— if you're at that stage and you've never used all property management before, Try it. Get some leads flowing through. The worst that could happen there that I can imagine at a mature situation with the BDM with experience, it's effective in their role, that's calling leads back immediately. The worst thing that can happen there is low. Could be, could be a waste. The worst thing that could happen with paid advertising in general is a giant smoking crater of tens of thousands of dollars that are completely wasted. Google AdWords, agency partnerships and relationships, those can really leave a giant smoking hole. So the worst thing that you can do is attempt to apply no learning, no insight, no skill acquisition, just throw money at the problem. That is by far the worst thing that you can do. The average thing that you can do, the average response that I see folks engage in, is probably in many cases is some flavor of that. It's really common to see growth be a means to an end where the owner almost views it as like not legitimately a part of the business. Like this is necessary to grow, unfortunately, but it's not even a legitimate part of the business, the sales and marketing function. They personally feel connection with ops. They built it, they stood it up, they have opinions about it. But sales marketing, they don't really want to know about. They're not invested in it. They don't have opinions. And because of that, they don't apply oversight. And so it tends to be this orphaned, anemic part of the organization. And therefore outsourcing appears very attractive. The move is to actually develop the skill and the competence. And I do see a minority of operators doing this. And I, man, it just, I feel like a lot of heart connection every time I talk to an operator that's doing this. They did hire somebody internally. They did have a strategy. They did lead the strategy themselves. They created content. They had some taste. The content that they created wasn't like, hey, if I can produce crap content and it gets clicks, fine. That's not a useful orientation. That— does that sound like something the free market is going to reward? No, that sounds like loophole seeking. The, the owner takes the approach of what would add value if there was no exchange of funds taking place? What would add value for the marketplace? Because if I can achieve that, the odds of money actually exchanging place are very, very high. So the best approach is going to where your audience is, finding ways to, to add value, which in the process demonstrates expertise, becoming the guy or the gal in the relevant conversation where the conversation is happening. Now, is that easy? No. Is that difficult? Yes. Can that be very intensely rewarding? Yeah, absolutely. It, it's more than just the leads it generates. It's the way that it impacts your company, the way that you hold yourself, the pride that your staff has, the conversation that you're able to be a part of, the level and depth of consideration required to think bigger about how you serve your clients, what they need, what they're interested in, how to frame it and how to talk about it. That is the move. And that's somewhat generic. And yet for the person with the right intention, that's all you need. If you have the intention to do what I just described, the specifics will fall into place.

Sounds hard. Fair. Very fair. That sounds hard. So yeah, what comes up for me there? So I think I'm back to like not going to property management conferences, but instead going to real estate conferences, real estate investor conferences, local real estate investor meetup groups. Like in some ways when I go to a property management conference, it feels indulgent. It's like, yeah, there's a bunch of my peers here and we're going to complain about our owners and tenants and we're going to talk about regulations that are coming and that all feels great and it's super fun, but I haven't really learned anything about my customer. So yeah, I do, I do think that what you articulated is super valuable. I just think like the translation of that into, okay, but what do I do? That is very, very hard for almost every property management business owner. And I think that's obvious if you look around. That's why very few people are executing. And you could probably list off on one or two hands, like the peers that you admire in this space who have hired someone internally and taken a position and produced content for years that's high value with no expectation of anything in return. For me, and by the way, I have failed in this area. I took the easy route, which is to produce content for my peers who I like better, unfortunately, than our customers. And I built a whole business around that. A lot of honesty here. I dig it. I often wonder like, what if I had taken that same level of intention and discipline and been producing content for real estate investors and accidental landlords this whole time for the last 2 or 3 years? What if I had made a podcast for them? What if I had made a newsletter for them? What if I had been going to their conferences and speaking? But I didn't because I didn't want to. And if I would've tried to have forced it, it wouldn't have worked. And so what really this comes all back to me, and I wanna get your take on this, is like, it's back to that ideal customer profile. Your customer, you have to care about your customer. You have, you have to select a customer. That you care about and that you want to see succeed. I know you've done that, Jordan. You've talked a lot about like your heart is with small business owners and operators who are showing up and they're getting work done and there's not some highfalutin tech exit planned. No, this is like people who are getting stuff done, the heart and soul of America, like the small business owners. That's where your heart is and that's who you serve with your product. And I think for us property managers, we have to also identify among the wide world of rental property owners, who do we have a heart for? And then it will be much easier and more natural to produce things that are valuable for those people.

I couldn't agree more. And even as you're saying that, when I think about who's probably exempt from that list, I really wonder how many, how many of our people, how many of the, of my clients, folks you're talking to, have a heart to serve REITs? Yeah. How many have like a deep emotional resonance?

They're up late at night worrying about profit margins and, you know, dilution of shareholder value.

If I could just juice that BlackRock NOI, you know? Yeah, probably not. Now that's a layup. It's going to be something more specific for everybody. Beyond that, everybody has a subset of clients that they really do like. And if you don't, I mean, if you really don't have a subset of clients you like, man, should you be in this business? But if you do, the question is, what is it about those folks? What about those conversations feels so particularly good? How could you lean into that more? How could you feed more of that, expand more of that, and have the courage to eliminate the conversations with folks that you don't? A minority of the folks that you're not having that conversation with would come over and be amenable. A minority of those kind of the folks that you're not having those conversations with will have no interest whatsoever. And that's, that's okay. The thing that you said about serving the audience that you like and that you feel connection with, man, I'm really all for that. There coulda, woulda, shoulda. There's a million things we all could have done to make more money, but it's such a meaningless technicality. The question is like, what lights you up? That's to truly be of service, like to take the unique thing that you have, nobody else does, and to share that with the world.

That's a really, that's a beautiful thing.

Yeah.

And Jordan, I've really seen that in you. We've talked a lot about serving our customers and who we want to serve and, and how to serve them and how to reach them and how to potentially market to them. Something I've, I've observed in you, Jordan, is you've also taken a high level of interest in your team. The folks who work at LeadSimple, I know, occupy a lot of your mindshare in a great way. So when you think about, you know, work that you could do for the rest of your life, and Simon Sinek calls this the infinite game. What comes up for you in, in that area?

Oh, this feels like the, the question of a lifetime. It transcends what I'm doing right now. It's the question that I'll always be with, and it's the reminder that this is possible. For me, the wave that I ride constantly is the belief that if an external set of circumstances were to change, I would be happier, more fulfilled in some way. And I know that that's not true. I choose to believe that that's not true. It's not to say that circumstances don't have impact on things, but it is to say that that is just chasing an ever ephemeral, fleeting thing. That's just a reason to be unhappy. So how does that intersect with the work that lights me up? I think of it this way. The work that lights me up helps me know that I am being of service, and being of service is as high of an aspiration as I have here in the time that I have here on the planet. It doesn't mean that there's not hard days, there's not inconvenience, there's not things that I run into that won't upset me or create some friction, but at least it means that I know I'm really offering up what I have in a way that's maximally useful. To the people around me. So what comes to mind for me, it's a couple of things that I think, starting off with like the evidence of it, the evidence that I'm getting it right is high enthusiasm coming from me on an ongoing basis, confirmation from the people that I'm with that this is of value, which I think is probably— it creates some enthusiasm and some excitement and it lights them up. I'm able to do it for extended periods of time in a way that actually energizes me rather than depleting me. And I'm spending less time ruminating and hand-wringing in general. The activities that tend to intersect with that for me are strong people interaction. So it needs to be something where I'm having a meaningful interaction with people about topics that are of substance that are bigger conversations that allow for conversations about purpose and meaning and whether or not we're aligned and on the same page and doing something that we feel like is actually going to be impactful in the long term. Competition is important to me. There needs to be a scoreboard in place. I want to know that there's progress and I want to be working with people that are intrinsically driven by the idea of winning. Winning is important to me. And being around people that share that same energy and are willing to put themselves at risk for the sake of pursuing their vision, that's really important to me. I like putting my ass on the line. I like sitting and getting quiet and asking myself what really matters to me, what would be fulfilling. And then putting myself in a vulnerable position where it might not happen and being with other people that are excited by that rather than preferring to gain more security by just bending the performance criteria to whatever I know I'm already capable of doing with very little exertion.

Got it. And like, when I think about Lead Simple and how you show up with the team there, it's really clear that you're You're very oriented around connecting with team members, elevating them, mentoring them, I think it's fair to say, and really getting into a deep level of connection with team members at all levels throughout the company. That seems to me to be something that really lights you up and, and I know that's, that's part of LeadSimple's core focus is helping people become and achieve more than they thought possible. Is that something that you've always known about yourself? Like, were you having these types of conversations, like, you know, on the playground in junior high? You're like, really? And how does that show up for you when, uh, when you got hit by the baseball? Like, what comes up for you, right? Like, you're, you're, you're probing, uh, your classmates. In that way? Or like, where did, where did you fall in love with, with helping other people fulfill their highest calling?

Yeah, if I'm being totally honest with you, man, it wasn't until I realized how much it connected to performance. It's not the sort of thing that felt like intrinsically good and the goodness of it compelled me to engage with it. It was more like I tried a transactional grinding approach.

Did you try like the command and control?

Like some version of that? Yeah, yeah. You know, I went through— I went to a military academy when I was younger, and my disposition in general is more towards being a hard-ass. And I just— I tried that. So honestly, Peter, if that had worked, I— we'd be on a podcast and I'd be— you'd be asking like, so Jordan, have you always been a hard-ass? And I'd be like, Yes, Peter, I have. Yeah, very effective. It just— it didn't work for me. It did not work. So I opened myself. My commitment was to performance and to results, which meant I had to consider other things, including things that were very different than my default disposition. And I just found that neutrality helped. I just found that not getting frustrated with people, not getting upset, was more useful than getting upset and frustrated. I just found that most people want to do a good job. I just found that most people have a desire to have a really meaningful, heart-centered connection with their life's purpose, but lack the courage or the encouragement to figure out what that is. And if I can advocate for them to find what that is, whether or not it's at my company or at another company, everybody wins. Everybody wins when we have those conversations to say, hey, I want to be aligned. This is what I'm after. Are you into this? Does this light you up? If not, that's totally okay. If so, we're going to crush it and create incredible results. If not, we're just going to be kind of canceling each other's efforts out. So it was a very pragmatic thing for me rather than anything driven by, you know, trying to make the world a better place.

Very interesting. I don't know that I would've predicted that answer. It's a very practical approach that's resulted in a very prosocial position or a very, I mean, I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it altruistic, but from the outside I do think people would assume, oh, he's doing that because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He thinks it's better for the world. But you just articulated, listen, this leads to better business outcomes. I'm seeking effectiveness over and above what somebody may think as good behavior or altruism. That's something I enjoy about our discussions is that I think you and I both are very focused on what is effective, what works, and we're much more interested in that than entrenching our existing positions. Along those lines, I like something— you, you mentioned the word neutrality in your answer just then, and I was amazed at a recent thing that happened. I want to ask you about it. LeadSimple was taking some heat on one of the forums on Facebook recently about something that doesn't matter, and it was pretty direct. And as a LeadSimple fan and as, as someone who's very closely connected with the company, I got a little— whoo, it felt very heavy for me. It felt— it got me a little worked up in a way that I don't experience very much anymore. And I asked— oh, and you jumped in the comments and left a very professional, very chill, appropriate response and basically agreed with the person. And I asked you about it later. I was like, how did you— how could you do that? How did you— how could you not like pushed back on that and you were like, uh, honestly, I, it just struck, I, I was neutral. I think there were some interesting things that were raised there. And, uh, like you were so, like, you were neutral about it and, and I, and you didn't just say that. Like, it was clear to me that you were in a way that I'm not able to be with our customers. Like, for example, at the property management company, if we get a client who starts acting Acting out and saying negative things about the company online and threatening to sue and all this stuff. Like I get very animated. I get very personally invested in the outcome, even if it's not going to affect the business, like bottom line. So I like, how do you do this? I need, I need some Jordan advice here. I need more of this in my life because it, it's obviously working. I think it's, it's. Happier way to go about life. And that's not a military academy response to a negative situation at your company. So you've obviously picked this up somewhere else along the line.

Yeah, I'd say two things. Number one, I haven't experienced having folks be out to get me. I can think of a very small minority of situations where it's plausible that somebody really did just want to stick it to me for its own sake. And even in those situations, it's clear to me that that's not about me. Like, that's, that's their issue, their life's work kind of playing out in that behavior. But in general, the vast majority of the static or pushback I get, nobody's out to get me. They just, they're providing feedback, and I get to choose what meaning that feedback has. So I don't take— I just genuinely don't take it personally because it does not strike me as probable that their end goal is me suffering as opposed to it stemming from some other motivation. And the other thing is, I'm very— when people tell me I'm wrong or I'm making a mistake, my default orientation is something like, yeah, that's my idea. My idea is that I'm doing something suboptimal because I have very lofty goals. And I'm not at them yet, and I live in America, so like nobody's oppressing me or preventing me from achieving them. There's something I'm doing that is standing between me and my goals. And if what this person is saying is a part of that, it's like, wow, thanks. I was looking for that. Thanks for showing me the thing that was happening. So it's very much not like I'm yielding to them or like, oh yeah, you're right. It's like, no, bro, like that was my idea. Thank you. Thanks for pointing that out.

That, that was helpful. Wow. That, I found that very helpful.

That, that's interesting.

Yeah. I'm like processing this because I think there's a lot of wisdom there, so I'll think I'll be relistening to this segment. Thank you for sharing that, Jordan.

Yeah, man.

Great jamming with you as always. Yeah, this was great. I know we went a little over, but I think we did better last time. We were closer to 2 hours, so we'll, We'll spare our listeners, free them up for an hour here. Thanks for coming on the show, Jordan. It's been great to catch up with you as always. Love our conversations. If people want to follow along with you and LeadSimple and what's going on, where's the best place for them to do that?

Yeah, you can go to profitablepropertymanagement.com, join the newsletter and check out new pods when they drop. And yeah, go to leadsimple.com to check out what we're cooking and what we're up to there.

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.