Watch Peter Lohmann Build a Move-In Process In Realtime

All right. Welcome in, everybody. How you doing today, Kelly?

I'm fantastic. How are you?

Great. I'm doing awesome. It's a nice, clear, sunny day here in Ohio. Pretty good temps. How about where you are?

We just got our first snow yesterday.

Wow. So, uh, not the same. That's awesome. Well, welcome in, everybody. We're going to give folks a minute or two. To get joined. In the meantime, we have a new welcome question from— suggested by Kelly, which I like a lot. Do you already have your winter holiday decor set up? Some, all, or none? Please put in chat some, all, or none if you have your winter holiday decor set up in your house. I see a lot of sums.

So, people are already getting started. I see a lot of nuns, which those are my people. I'm a nun.

So I think I'm— I think I saw my wife sneaking out a couple items from the basement the other day. I see a pillow on the couch and a snowflake mug around my house already.

So you're— so you're a sum?

I think I'm a sum. Better. I better type it in the chat. Sum.

Unintentional sum.

Correct.

No, my mom would probably come from Oregon, and I would be in big trouble if I started putting Christmas up before Thanksgiving.

Jim Duffy said it's not December 24th.

I hear you.

I hear you. All right. Love that. I'm not seeing anyone that says like everything though. No, I didn't see any all. So people are holding out still. All right. So We got an awesome group here, as you can see from the chat flashing by faster than you could read. We got a bunch of people in here excited to watch me build a process in real time. So we're gonna have a lot of fun with that. And we have a great volunteer, uh, who you and I are gonna sort of work with Kelly to, to build out this process and show how we think about it. But let's just kick off Kelly, if you wanna introduce yourself for a minute and then I'll do the same and we'll get going.

Sure. For those of you who don't know me, I am Kelly Segreto. I run a property management consulting business and process solutions. So we do all things operations, property management consulting, uh, business strategy, teams, tech, process. But we really dive deep into that process component and help build out digital processes for teams like we're doing today.

Awesome. Yeah. So For those who don't know me, I think most of you probably do, but I'm Peter Lohmann. I own a property management company here in Columbus, Ohio called RL Property Management. We manage about 685 rental homes and apartments in central Ohio. I've been doing it professionally for about 10 years, and I haven't— I actually have a control systems engineering background, so I'm a very systems and process-oriented person, and that's sort of the lens through which I view our industry. All right. So I want to start by just taking a couple minutes to talk about why bother doing any of this? Like, what's the point of building out a process or even documenting your process in the first place? Um, a lot of people I run into are just sort of like, when I ask them about, you know, do you have your processes documented or do you use a system for your processes? They say, no, I just, I know what I need to do. Like, when a lease gets signed, I just do this, this, and this, and I know that that's what I need to do. So that can work really well when you are small or if it's just you doing the work. But as you grow and scale, it starts to become really important to have a system or a process for the major functions at your property management company. Kelly, what are you seeing? You, you work with folks of all different sizes. What are some of the advantages of getting this stuff documented in some type of a system?

There's a couple really key pieces. Yes, it's for that repeatability. It's having a roadmap to follow. It creates more efficiency because you have less time lost of trying to remember what your next step is or trying to remember where you left off when you inevitably get phone calls in the middle of whatever you were trying to do. But there's also that component of collaboration. Once you have a team that's of a size where you've got moving pieces that are happening by different individuals, tools, uh, and accountability. It's, it's holding people to a standard within your organization and having that ability to follow up on the day-to-day operations. Having digital process is the only way you have visibility into the day-to-day. Your property management software is not going to show you that. Some of your insight tools aren't going to show you that. It's really, it's vital to that component.

Yeah, when I got started in the industry and I got set up with our property accounting software I quickly realized that that software, great as it is, it almost doesn't— I mean, I'm not endorsing or saying one is better than another, but regardless of which one you're using, they're all generally pretty good at accounting and a few other functions, but they don't really tell you about your business operations. Like, it's not easy to look up and see what's the status of all my move-ins, what's the status of all my lease renewals, what's the status of all my new property onboarding that I'm doing for new owners. And that's where having a system is really going to help. So a couple of things jumped out as to why I started going down this path. One, I wanted to know the status of all of our processes. And if everyone's just keeping it in their head, there's no sort of dashboard or view where I can keep an eye on everything that's going on. I'm also kind of a stickler for details. So I want everything to be done the same way every time. And I want to improve and iterate on that process. As time goes on so I can make my company better and better and better and deliver better results for our owners and our residents and even save time by streamlining things. And then also, and you kind of mentioned this, Kelly, but if someone's out or leaves your company, it becomes really difficult to sort of figure out what's going on if you don't have your stuff documented and in a system that you can see the status. So So there's a lot of advantages here. That's why you hear a lot of people in the industry talking about this. So I think most of you, if you're on this call, you generally buy into this or you probably wouldn't be watching. So I don't, I'm not going to belabor the point, but I think what most of you are probably wondering is more on the how. You've probably bought into the why. So that's what I like about doing a workshop like this. Kelly, you mentioned a book. For folks who want to go a little deeper here. What, what book was that called?

Process. It's in the EOS library. It's really a great way to think about process in a way that is concise and looking at that 20% that's going to give you 80% and simplifying before you build to make whatever process you end up building, whether it's a move-in like we're building today or other processes, manageable and digestible for your team.

Got it. I just dropped a link to that book if anyone wants to check it out. Okay, awesome. So we've got the why. I want to talk about how to get started with documenting your processes. So if you do not already have your processes documented, I want to speak to you for a minute, and then we're going to move on and talk about how to get the documented process onto a platform. But if you don't have anything written down or documented for your processes, here's what I recommend that you do. And I wanna hear what you have to say about this too, Kelly. It just start as simple as possible. It can literally be pen and paper, or you can just use Microsoft Word or Google Sheets or Docs or whatever. But all you really need to do is write down the steps. And I'm gonna share my screen and show something that I think is going to be helpful if you haven't started documenting your processes yet, or even if you have. But this is like an overview of what I think of as the core property management processes. Um, we're going to be talking today about move-ins, but each one of these buttons here is basically a major process or a major function within your property management business. What I like about this graphic is it shows what I believe are the most useful breakpoints between the processes. So sometimes I talk to someone and I ask about their move-in process, for example, and they start telling me about their tenant screening and I, and I kind of just say, hey, well, I actually think it makes a lot of sense if you break those into two processes and you have like an application process and then you have a move-in process. So rather than reinventing the wheel and trying to figure out where's the best place to start and stop your various processes and break them into multiple. This is sort of what I recommend. This happens to be a graphic from LeadSimple. That's not really relevant. It's just, I really like the way this is shown. What do you think, Kelly?

I'd agree with that. This is, I normally tell people to, to think about it as like 8 to 12 core processes. I think this is 15 here, but yes, this is right in line with what we typically see as far as the, the core processes that people build out and, and are thinking about.

Yeah, I agree. There's probably a couple on here that are like a little— not necessarily you need to start with, but we're going to be talking today about move-in, which is definitely one of the, one of the core processes. Um, okay. So if you don't have those documented first, I recommend you use those, those breakpoints of the different types of processes. And then all you need to do is just write down what you're doing now. So when you move a tenant in, what do you do? That's your move-in process. When you move a tenant out, what do you do? That's your move-out process. Just write down the steps. You don't have to write down like how to do every step. The main idea is just capturing each sort of discrete step or discrete task that you're doing. Property management is really just tasks at scale. That's how I think of it. And so getting the tasks that you do for each process written down is the first step? And again, simpler the better. What's your, what's your guidance here? Because I know you do a lot of this, Kelly.

There's a couple of different things you can do. One, you should see some of the ways that people have provided process to me. It is awesome. I had somebody that just scribbled the steps on the back of an envelope and took a picture of it and sent it to me. That one was pretty great. But one of the tools that I really like is called Scribe. And you can Google Scribe and find that, but it's a great tool where you can just go through it on your screen and it will give you a play-by-play of what those steps are. And so then that can help you as a framework to then, and then you can also use video clips from it and everything else to infuse into your process. There's some really cool things, but it's a great way if, if you're not great at writing things down and thinking through it that way. Sometimes video is a better way to capture, and you can do it in a Loom video and have somebody else on your team scribe it for you, or you can use a digital tool like Scribe that uses AI technology to scrape your video and put it into bullet points.

Yep. Love that. So again, the main thing is just get it documented in some way, shape, or form. That's the starting point. And I don't want people, I think get a little overwhelmed at this step and they think it has to be fancy software. It really doesn't. I started with just a Microsoft Word doc. Okay. So let's assume now you've got at least one of your core processes documented. What then do we recommend? And we're getting closer to the point where I'm going to start building it in real time. So what I really recommend here is that you start with like that Microsoft Word doc or Scribbles or however you do it. At this point, you want to move it onto some type of a workflow or process software platform. And you have a lot of options here. And, you know, I use LeadSimple. Prior to LeadSimple, I used Process Street. There's other software. People use Asana, people use Monday, people use Appley. Kelly, you could probably list off 5 or 10 more that folks use. And they all— I don't wanna say they're all the same, cuz they're not, but the functionality that you're after here they all provide, which is you can have multiple processes concurrently. Sorry, my dog was growling. Uh, you can have multiple processes concurrently and you can see the status of all of them and you can edit a template that every time you run one of those processes, it will start a new— excuse me, a new version of that, a new instance. So like there's this concept of like a template and then an instance. The template is like the thing you built in Word. What I used to do is like that thing in Word, I would print off a new version for every move-in and I would kind of fill it out as I went and I would check it off with a pencil. That's like the instance. And so this workflow software, that's what it's designed to do is you create this template and then every time you run or you create a new version, that's an instance of it. And you have multiple going concurrently and they can have due dates and they can have different stages and they can have tasks assigned to different people and you can see if things are overdue and you can reorder them and there's a lot, you know, we haven't even talked about automation, but there's a lot of power there once you move to one of these platforms. What are you laughing at, Kelly?

We haven't even talked about automation yet.

I know. Yeah.

Don't get Peter started. It's great. It's great. No, I think that Regardless of what tool you use, the base functionality you're looking for is that opportunity to create a template. Some of these project softwares don't have that functionality, and you may be able to get a free version of a tool that you're just kind of ad hoc making checklists. That's not what we're talking about as much as those, those tools that allow you to create an actual template that can be kicked off again and again and again for every move out, for every move in, for every work order, whatever it may be that you're you're capturing in your process.

Exactly. So that's the step that we're gonna, that we're gonna dive into today, today, because I think it's the step that folks find the most intimidating and they start to look into these different softwares and they look at the prices and they look at sort of the buildouts and they start to feel overwhelmed. And I don't blame you at all. I felt the same way when I first started looking at these things because everyone sort of intuitively understands a list of tasks in a Word document or an Excel doc or a Google Sheet. But when you, when you create an account in one of these softwares, you're presented with kind of a blank screen and you're sort of like, all right, I don't even know like what I'm doing or where anything goes or what belongs in here, or like how granular should I be getting with these things, let alone like assigning different tasks to different people. And then there's all these questions about is the team even gonna use it? And we're gonna talk about that. So the whole goal with today is I want to sort of demystify and really show how quick and easy it can be to get up and running and get started with one of these things, with one of the common processes that we all do as property managers. So let's go ahead and bring Chris up. So we have an awesome volunteer, Chris Mattson, who is going to share what he has documented with his process thus far. And then we are going to build his process for him in LeadSimple right now. So welcome. Welcome on, Chris.

Thank you very much, Peter. Glad to be here. Wish I could get my camera to work, but I'll be just the mystery property manager.

No worries. Yeah. So Chris's camera was working in the pre-show a few minutes ago and all of a sudden it died. So we're going to proceed without video and We got his audio loud and clear, so that's great. So I will share my— actually, Chris, sorry, why don't you, if you wouldn't mind, give like just a 1 or 2 minute background on yourself so folks kind of know sort of where you are and, and sort of what kind of a management company you're running.

Oh, sure, sure. I, I am— have a small property management company. We're out of Spring, Texas, which is a suburb of Houston. We manage about 115 doors currently, most of which, 95%, are all single family. Um, the company right now is just my wife and myself. My, my son is getting his real estate license and will soon be joining us. And we've got a, a maintenance VA and another VA that, that helps me. But my business is at the point we're growing relatively rapidly that my business runs me, not the other way around. And that's kind of why I'm at the table. And like you mentioned, I, I've been using an Excel workbook with a separate sheet for each major transaction that we undergo as property managers for the last— gosh, we've been doing it for 6 years. And so last night I was jotting down some notes for some checklists, and this is the one I did for move-in. And, you know, the more and more I go through this process, I'm revising things further and further, but trying to keep them simple, but at the same time fairly detailed. So I do know that if I ultimately bite the bullet with LeadSimple and decide to go into this, I'm going to probably further break down each of these a little bit further to give it a little more detail. But I, I need something like LeadSimple that can at least automate it because my spreadsheet works fantastic, but it doesn't automate itself and it doesn't evolve. I have to actively be involved, and so I'm trying to minimize that.

Chris, that was perfect. I think you, I think you are in a large boat, meaning there's many, many, many people who are in your same boat and are in exactly where you are with your business and with your processes and your systems. So what, what I've shared here on the screen is what Chris shared with me prior to the show today, which is his current documented move-in process. So it came over as a PDF, but he, you have this as like a Google Sheet, right? You still there, Chris?

I'm still here. Can you hear me?

Oh yeah. So you have this as a Google Sheet, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know why it got switched over, but yeah, it's a workbook that I've got about 8 tabs on it for different tasks.

Got it. And so when you, when somebody, um, when you get the security deposit, which it looks like that's the first step here. Do you like print this off and check it off as you go, or you just kind of reference it as like a reminder of everything that has to happen?

In, in, in the Excel spreadsheet, we can put multiple properties. So we've got one dashboard where we can see all properties going through, for instance, the move-in process and where they are. And we just check off each of these blocks, if you could visualize that. So it's just kind of a dashboard that I can look at. And get a big picture understanding of what's going on with all our properties.

All right, great. I think that's an awesome setup for what we're, what we're going to jump into here. So I'm about to pull up LeadSimple and start building this. Before we do, Kelly, anything you want to say to kind of set the stage? Any questions for Chris? Anything that we didn't touch on that would be good to, good to know?

I think there's a couple of just really quick, important things. Process is living and breathing, uh, documentation for your business. And so what we build today, if we were to just take these steps and add nothing to it, that's a great starting point to get some accountability and just start that framework. You may decide each year to review these. I highly recommend that you may decide every 6 months or that in a month you want to add more detail. That's totally fine. The biggest thing is start just ripping off that Band-Aid and getting into a tool and starting to use it like that. That accountability piece that you're creating in Google Sheets becomes so much more meaningful when you're able to, to track it and have that accountability across the board. It's, it's very, very cool. So I'm excited to see this start to be built.

Love it. So I'll mention one thing before we do that, which is I see you have on here security deposit received and lease signed. So I would technically put that under the applications process and then the move-in process for me starts when we have a signed lease in hand. Now it's not— go ahead, Chris.

No, I was going to say, you know, I typed this out sitting on my iPad in the dark late last night. And I think, I think when I look at that now, I would back that out and and tag it to my new lease checklist. So I completely track what you're saying.

Yep, that's no problem at all.

I do see people put it in, in one or the other. It's typically one of those pieces to look at and make sure you're not duplicating in both processes. Uh, I've also seen people pull out that lease sign process as a process on its own, but I'd say most typically we see it in the application process.

Yep.

Can I ask a question, Peter? Is— I assume that with something like LeadSimple that if the signed lease being received is my last task and for instance a new lease being done, can the system automatically kick in the move-in process right then and there?

Yes, it can.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's once I understand it would probably have to be how I build the, build the ship in the system, if you will.

Yep. Okay. So we're gonna get started. And by the way, I want to do Q&A as we go. So I've got time at the end set aside for Q&A, but this, the whole idea with today is that it's casual, it's informative, it's high value. And so I'm happy to have this be conversational as we go. This is not some slick pre-prepared scripted presentation I'm giving. This is just me talking about. Stuff that I love, which is property management processes. So if you've got questions, please pop them in the chat or the Q&A. Kelly's going to sort of keep an eye on that stuff while I start building and sort of talking as I go. Okay. So what you're looking at right here is our LeadSimple account. And I'm just, I'm just using our account cause I already have access to it. So you can see these are all of our processes over here, but we are going to go ahead and create a brand new one. So I'm going to click the plus. And this would be the same thing you would do if you were using LeadSimple. I wanna also say that I'm using LeadSimple because I'm familiar with it, but the, the general mindset that I'm hoping to share today should work for any of these platforms. So if you're on Applee or you're on Process Street, or you're on Airtable or anything, you're gonna have to like slightly adapt to the details of what we talk about. But I'm hoping that the sort of philosophy will come through loud and clear and the general approach to processes, which, spoiler alert, I'm a big fan of keeping things simple. So, okay. So, we're going to go to new custom pipeline. Or sorry, new custom process right here. Yeah. New custom process. All right. We're going to call this Chris move-in process. Okay. I'm going to click save. Okay. We don't, we can't have the dash in there. Sorry. Okay. So this dumps us on a screen where we are going to set up the user assignments and roles. In the interest of keeping this really simple, we are not going to really talk about this, at least not right now. If we have time, we may come back to this. I'm going to remove my team from here so they're not getting a bunch of notifications as we start to build these and, and sort of create examples. There's a whole bunch of fun stuff you can do with user roles and default process owners, and you could spend all day digging into all the power that's on this screen. But we are not going to do that because I like keeping things simple. And this is what I did when I started, as I ignored all of this stuff and just started building. So, if we go to overview here, there's a little bit of text here where you can create, you know, just explain the process and write a little bit about what it's going to be and what it's going to do. I think it's best practice here to talk about like what kicks off this process and what is the outcome. So— Okay. Yeah. Trigger is— lease signed. End state is tenants and lease fully set up in PM software, all related tasks complete. So that way, if you know, you're just, if you, someone have new at the company and they're clicking through the processes, they sort of get a feel for, for what this is.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Or if you have a brand new employee that you're onboarding and they're trying to get a feel for what the different components are in the lifecycle of a management agreement or a lease agreement, it helps them as well.

Yep. So again, there's a whole bunch of settings here that we are going to just completely ignore. The main, the main screen in LeadSimple that you are going to spend most of your time on, especially when you're building a process, is this stages and workflow screen. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what the types of stages are in LeadSimple and what is a stage in the first place. So this, these things that say backlog, working, completed, those are stages. A stage is just a major milestone in the completion of a process. So in a move-in process, you're going to see that there's a few sort of like major steps in on your path to completing a move-in process. LeadSimple has this concept of backlog stages, active stages, completed stages, and canceled stages. And some of these are kind of self-explanatory. So like canceled stage, we'll, we'll add one here that just says like tenant changed mind. Like they decided not to move in and we're going to, we need to cancel the lease. The completed stage is obviously like, you know, the, the system or you are done with the stage. So like completed, uh, move in, moved in. Yeah. Um, working, we're probably gonna add a couple other, um, active stages. So I'll leave that right there. Backlog stages, we're probably not gonna mess with unless we have time. We'll come back to that. The main stages that you're gonna be working with most of the time is these active stages.

That backlog stage is really just where you put people, where you put steps that are in a holding pattern. If you're waiting for information to come back, or if you're waiting on an owner for an approval, or any of those kind of like waiting periods, that's what your backlog stages are.

Yep.

Is that changing an active stage to a backlog, or do you just know these are my typically backlog stages in, in this process?

You can trigger when you're in a stage, and I'm sure Peter will get through this, but when you start getting into your tasks, let's say you're in an active stage task and you need to push someone to a holding area, you can shift them in the process to the backlog stage depending on that conditional logic or depending on answers to questions that you have in your in your process.

Yep. So there's a couple ways you can approach things from here, um, and I'm going to pull up your list here. So we could basically take and put all of these steps under this working stage and just keep it really, really simple, or we could add a couple other stages that are major steps or major milestones in the completion of these actions. So like a common one for a move-in process, like usually you would start with like, you know, lease signed as kind of like the starting point. And then maybe you want to have something for like, um, uh, tenant ready for move-in or ready for key pickup. So that, that could be like You know, you've got the lease signed, you've got the security deposit, you've got the utility information, you've got all the other, you know, renters insurance and everything's ready, but the tenant hasn't come by to pick up their keys yet, but you're ready for them to do so. Then you may have another one that's like post-move-in tasks, right? And that would be here. And then you might have The last one might be something like remaining items.

You can ask a question. Yeah. In your experience, you know, I go back and forth sometimes. My checklists have, you know, 80 items on there because if you go into like filling out details for a property inside my property management software, Rentvine, there's, there's a myriad of things I can track every one of them. Or do I just track, hey, did I get everything for the property in Rentvine and leave it as simple as that? Do you recommend keeping the checklist really simple or go big and make it very detailed like you're flying an airline or you're checking, doing the checklist?

So I think I lean more toward keeping it simple, especially when you're starting. If you try and get every single tiny little detail, what can happen is you get really bogged down. And you feel like, well, I don't quite have all the information I need. And then you never end up actually launching and running with the process. And that's what I want to head off today. You can always go back and add stuff. It's actually a lot easier to add more details and more steps than it is to sort of delete and combine.

That's what I figured. Keep it simple, stupid.

I'd say keep it simple, but we have had people who in later iterations, in your first draft, absolutely keep it as simple as possible. In later drafts, you may decide that you want this to be a training ground for employees coming in, but I would absolutely, um, recommend that you leverage the training of your, your property management softwares and those things that— those help documents. Link to those instead of recreating the wheel, because if they move one button in their software, you're now out of date. And so keep your, keep your details, and Peter can show you where that information is stored in your instructions for those types of details to be stored. But little Loom videos for instruction or links to help articles within the property management software is really helpful in later iterations.

100%. Thank you. And like, you guys kind of saw me like making up names for this as we went. And maybe you're thinking like, well, geez, doesn't Peter have like standard names and standard stages? Like he's kind of seems like he's just sort of making it up and messing around with stuff. Yes, that's the point. I want you to understand that this stuff is not carved in concrete. You can change names, you can reorder things, you can add stages, you can remove stages. This does not have to be perfect. It's a, it's a tool. And so, um, I could, yeah, I could pull up my move-in process that we've run 3,000 times and see exactly the names that we have and everything. But I wanted you to get a feel for how it is when you're getting started. You're sort of like, you're like, I don't really know. Like, is this supposed to be its own stage? I'm not really sure. That's fine. That's normal. That's part of the process. You don't need to be a process expert to run a property management company. That is very sort of self-running. You just need to sort of not be afraid to mess around and try some stuff.

You just said it with so much confidence that they assumed that it was— there was some structure around it. Yeah, but no, it's, it's not rocket science and there isn't a right answer. Your organization may run a little bit differently than somebody else's organization. That doesn't— it does not make their process more correct or your process less correct. But what I will say about stages is keep in mind that only one stage will be open at a time for your team. So if you have tasks that have to happen at the same time or somewhat simultaneously, be really careful that they're not in separate stages within your, your process.

Yep. Okay, so we've got kind of a basic skeleton of our stages set up, and we can always go back and mess with these. But let's dive in and start actually building on what we've started. So if I click in here, what we're looking at now is the lease signed stage. And here's where I can actually add the tasks that you and your team need to do as part of this part of the process. So let me go back to what you already have documented here. So let's assume we've got, so we can add, we can add this as a, um, as a step, which is Security deposit received and entered into PAS, property accounting software. Is there anything, Chris, with this that—

it's like share, share, share docs with tenant via dot loop.

Okay. Yeah, I see that here. Yeah. Yep. We're going to assume the lease has already been signed. Is there, is there something you need to do with like uploading the lease? Because I think you said you use Rentvine. Do you need to like upload the lease to Rentvine or is that going to happen automatically?

You know, no, that will not be asked. We have to do that. So to do.

Okay.

And probably the last thing is we schedule the move-in date because typically the way we operate, we do key signovers with tenants at properties and go through and have a face-to-face conversation, walk them through the property, show them things like water shut-off, electrical boxes, stuff like that.

But so, okay, so sorry, I was just thinking about when you were saying that, I was thinking about this. So let me just copy this in here because this looks like a good one.

So for actually for this one, one is something that I'd like to find out, like, can you get it automated once a lease has been signed and once they're put in Rentvine, it automatically goes out with the welcome letter?

That's what I was getting. That was exactly what I was going to say. So this step right here is a great candidate for an email template. And this is really common. So all we need to do is instead of clicking, um, To Do, which is what I have been doing, we're just going to click Email. And I will paste this in here, send getting ready for your lease document. And right here we have this dropdown where it says Contact Roles. So I'm going to go back to User Roles and Assignment, and I'm going to add a— I'm going to— where is this? We need to add basically the tenants to our process, and that is in your general here.

Yeah.

So we're going to add a contact role. We are going to say tenants, and we're going to map that to Buildium leases.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. So, then we go— okay.

You have yours set up differently, but yes.

Yes. Okay. So, we're going to go back to stages and workflows. We're going to go back to the one we were just in. And then under contact roles now— okay. I didn't give it a good name. Let me go back to that. Contact name, tenants. Maybe I didn't hit save.

Checkmark.

Checkmark.

Checkmark.

There we go. Okay.

Nailed it.

Nailed it. So, we go back in here and— okay, great. So, we— so, now we can attach a template. And we're just going to click create new. And we're going to say new tenant welcome email. Welcome to your new property. Hello, this is Chris with— what's the name of your management company?

Guardian Property Management.

Guardian PM. Thanks for renting with us. Attached, please find some important info about your upcoming move-in. And we can attach files here and do all kinds of fun stuff. So I'll just hit save. Let me go back in there actually. And under the to field, okay. Contact, specify the process. That's great. So if you wanted, Chris, you could like add your email here to CC or BCC, just so like when you first get rolling with this, you have a little comfort bubble that it's happening and you can see how it looks and all that good stuff. Yeah. So here—

I also see a lot of people will classify in parentheses whether it's a tenant email or an owner email. It makes it easier as you're sorting through these later to know what kind of communication you're sending out. Sometimes your template name isn't quite as descriptive as we'd like to be.

Yeah, that's a good best practice. So we, now we've got an email template that's going to go out to tenants. As part of this process. And so when— and you'll see when we go to run the process, you can either have it be where you just click and it sends, or if we click this lightning bolt, it's actually going to happen automatically and you don't even have to click send.

And so with that lightning bolt, does it tell us what, what, what's the trip that got— gets that thing fired off?

It'll be as soon as the prior task is completed, unless if you want, you can set a delay. So if you wanted to do like you know, 2 hours after the previous step or 2 hours after, you know, you can— we're getting into like some custom fields and stuff here, but you can customize. But basically it's normally kind of triggered after the previous step.

Okay. And in this case, upload lease to software.

Yep.

Once that's done, bam, the other one goes. Okay.

Exactly. So I'm trying to think of what else you mentioned something before we got into this that you wanted to be included in this process in this part of the process.

You know, you know, obviously at some point we have to schedule a move-in date. So that would be, I would look down probably a meet.

Right?

Is that what that is?

I think this is probably just let's leave it as a to-do for right now.

Okay.

So schedule. Move-in date with tenants. Yeah. Yep.

And so when we do our— we get to the property before we move in, we do our ZInspector move-in report. That's another to-do, and that automatically gets uploaded with— because it syncs with Rentvine. And then we—

the way this is built presently, you're still in the lease signed stage. Would you move to a different stage at this point, Peter?

So I think that's going to be the last step for lease signed. And I think what we want to do is as soon as all of these steps are ready, we want to move automatically to the ready for key pickup stage. So I don't know if you saw what I did down there, but at the bottom, the default is when you complete all of these tasks, it's just going to stay in this lease signed status or stage. But what I did is I clicked this dropdown and I select ready for key pickup, which is the next stage, the next step. Um, and so as soon as you complete all these, it's automatically going to move you to this stage. Does that make sense?

Chris, quick question for you. Are you doing that ZInspector move-in report at the same time that they are meeting you at the property to do that move-in, or are you doing that in advance?

It varies. It, it usually it might be the day, the day of before they get there, or depending. So I, I suppose I would probably move schedule move-in date and see inspector move into the second stage that we just created. That's probably— I probably move those down.

Got it. So I'm going to click this right arrow here, which is going to take me to the next stage, which is this ready for key pickup. And I'll just click to-do. I'm going to paste that because I copied it a second ago and now it's in this part of the stage. So let's, let's go back to the lease sign stage for a second. So look how fast that was, right? I don't know how long we've been in this part of the segment today, but it's been like 5 or 10 minutes and we've already built out. We've already built out one of the stages and we've got your major steps in here. Now, is there a bunch of stuff that we didn't talk about? Yeah, there's a ton of stuff we haven't talked about. Is there a bunch of other stuff we can do with this to make it slick and make it cool? Yes, of course there is. But you can add all that later, right? You can spend hours going over the LeadSimple docs or whatever software you're using. And we can do fun things like, you know, assign these to different people and add reminders and add, custom logic for like, is this a Section 8 lease or not? And if it is, we have these steps, and if it isn't, we do these steps. Yes, that's all fun and that's all great. But the point is, I want to show you that you're using, you know, Google Sheets. I can reproduce Google Sheets really, really fast and give you a whole lot more visibility and power in what you're doing even before we start, start talking about some of that really fun stuff.

Oh, you know, this is fantastic. What I'm kind of curious is to how does it look? How does the dashboard look like when you want to see the big picture of the entire battlefield, all your properties, all the various things going on so you know where to direct your attention and guidance to your, your minions?

Yep. So I'll just show you my live dashboard. And this is the LeadSimple dashboard. That they recently built, and it shows kind of the status of all of our processes, not just our move-in process. Um, if we go into a specific process, like I'll just, I'll go into our actual like lease signing, um, process. So if I remove all the filters, you can see we've run 387 of this lease signing checklist since this iteration of it in LeadSimple. And if I add, if I want to look at like completed, I guess that's going to be similar. Current, current is a good one. So this is kind of showing all of them that are in process right now. And you can see it shows like, you know, obviously the property address, the unit, um, whether it's, it has any overdue tasks, what stage it's in and who's assigned to it. So this is kind of like the, battlefield overview that you were talking about.

And as far as the overdue tasks, is that based on criteria that you put in as to how long something should take or based on when the lease is starting, when this should be done, etc., etc.?

Exactly. So it looks like we had a couple of tasks here that were due yesterday. Right. And so JD is likely working on these or maybe the tenant has dragging their feet on something or other, but this is what it looks like in a live process. So before we were in like the template editor view, but this is like an actual instance. Remember I was talking about like the template and the instance. This is an actual instance of, of this. It's not your version, but it's my version of the move-in process and what it looks like.

Gotcha.

Yes. To answer your question, Chris, the— you can set up due dates for each task and they can be triggered off of dates that you've populated, uh, or that come over from your property management software, or as Peter calls it, property accounting software. Um, and, or it can be populated off of how it interacts with, um, Jordan, uh, uh, or it can be triggered off of other steps that have happened previous to that step happening in the, in the process. So you set that up in that template version and you can set days or hours or minutes between different tasks based on your own set criteria.

Yep. Got you. So I need to go back in and edit this process, get back to where we were. So I don't want to get too fine-grained detail and sort of explain what every single button in here does. I do want to talk about one here, though. And that is the step instructions. And this is what Kelly was mentioning earlier when you were kind of asking like, how granular do I really want to get? Yeah. If you click step instructions here, this is where you would put like the fine-grained details, like, you know, one. Yeah. You know, get, you know, get money from the tenant and give them a receipt. Step 2, open Rentvine and go to blah, blah, blah screen. Click this button, blah, blah, blah. You could get really, really detailed here. So the other option that I really like, instead of doing this level of detail, you have a few options. A, you can— like Kelly was saying, you can link to your PAS, you know, user guide or documentation, the relevant page, and then that will help, you know, they all have great instructions on, hey, here, this is a common thing, right? Here's how you receive a security deposit into our system. The other thing you can do and/or is you can record a Loom video or, you know, Loom is like a screen recording software and, you know, there's a bunch of these., and embed it right here. And, uh, if you drop a link to a video here, it will appear embedded and you can click play or you can just do the link and click. I can't remember actually if it supports embeds or not, but in any case, you can link to a video. It does. Okay. Yeah. In any case, um, you can link to a video or embed it here and then, you know, that can be there as a really easy and quick way to document cuz you know how to do this, Chris. You've probably done it a hundred times, so you can just record yourself doing this part of the task and then, and then embed that recording.

Is there a way if you've already got like a detailed checklist with links and whatnot just to upload it to the entire process, or do you have to do it to each individual one so a new person knows where to find it? I don't know if that made sense or not.

You would have to upload each component of that document into the instructions on the step that it's relevant. So if you have a process doc that already has links, you would take those links and put them into the instructions on each task that they're relevant for. But that was the other thing I was going to add. If you have training documents you've already created or process documents you've already created or how-tos, you can lock— you can link to your, your Drive documents as well.

Okay.

Good, good.

Okay, so let's go to the ready for key pickup stage. So we've already got the Z-Inspector, um, task in here. Anything else that sort of happens while you're ready for key pickup or needs to happen?

Uh, Supra combo removed.

So this is before they, um, You do that before they pick up the key?

Oh, no, no, no. Ready for— so no, no, no. I guess if we've got it scheduled now, I guess it would be doing key signover, doing the actual key signover at property.

The other thing about processes is like, go ahead and use the language that you're already using, right? You know, the industry does have like some standardized terms and phrases and we're we're getting, you know, even more that way with the PMOP standard, which I'm gonna talk a little bit about. But you go ahead and use the language that you already use and that you like and makes sense to you and your team. So if you call it key signover, I've personally never used that phrase, but who cares? This is your process. So call it key signover. Um, key, what do you call it? Key signover. Is that what you just call it?

Does key signover conducted in its process? Yep.

Okay. Key sign over stage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. So, what happens— oh, he's got a hyphen. Okay. All right, Kelly.

Geez. You said I was gonna pick on you. We gotta get some of that in here.

All right. Is the O capital?

It's not.

Oh, no. All right. Let's fix that. Okay. All right. So, what all happens with the key sign over?

In most cases, we'll do the ZInspector report and move-in report.

Okay, so we have that at the ready for key pickup. So do you want this here? Is this like something that happens while you're waiting for the tenant to pick up the keys, or is it something that happens like—

Exactly. But I think, you know, you're obviously thinking something slightly different. But yeah, it would happen while I'm at the property. The tenant's coming that very day. And so I'm going to be able to walk the property, take these pictures, hand over the keys, and then take the combo and Supra off the property one last time. And tenant's now in control of the property.

What do you think, Kelly?

More of like a preparing for a move-in appointment.

It's—

we can certainly— but I guess with the software, it says that if I, if I did it beforehand, If I didn't do it beforehand, it would stop me from doing anything else after that, correct?

Or can you control that? Yeah, I err on the side of less stages is better. Yeah. Unless you have like a really good reason to switch stages, I'll typically keep things more generalized. So I would probably not—

I take that one out then, because if we've got any tasks for scheduling the key signover, that's probably the only thing that needs to be done.

Okay. So, it sounds like do we want to get rid of this ready for key pickup stage? Yep. Okay. Yep. All right. Cool. Delete. All right. So, now we have 3 main stages. Leasign, key sign over, remaining items. So, under key sign over, we will add back that thing we just removed. What else happens sort of—

That's remove Supra and combo.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, that's, that's going to happen most likely on the same day. And then a separate activity would be lease entered into lease, you know, and tenant information entered into RENTFINE.

Do we do that at the previous step?

I don't know if we did or not. Okay. The lease has been signed, but it hasn't necessarily— We haven't listed as entering it into rent fine.

So I think you may have added it in that previous.

Yeah, we have. Okay. So when you do that, do you do that like right when they sign it or do you do it when they pick up the keys?

You know, in our marketplace, it's not uncommon that we don't get a completed signed lease until the day of move-in. And so quite often, you know, I'd probably have to push that thing forward or make that one of the latter things because otherwise I don't want to go through and put it in there in case the thing falls apart last minute. So, okay.

Yeah, but there we go.

But I can see just going through this process and brainstorming it with some of my folks, we'll clean it up and exactly.

And like the error in my thought process, the little dialogue that we've been having over the last 10 minutes is totally normal. And it's totally part of the process is like you thought it was here, but actually it was here. And then we, we sort of rearranged and renamed and deleted a stage. Like that's the part I want to, I want to remove the fear and anxiety around. That's all very, very normal. And you don't, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be complicated.

Um, when you may kick this off and then decide you want to move something to another stage, it. Totally normal and just make the adjustment.

No big deal. Exactly. Okay. Anything else you want to add with the key sign over any other, like, steps or things that need to happen?

You know, no, I think what I do— we've got a little checklist that we have, a little talking points that I just uploaded to that little notes section here. Things like walk them around the property, show them water shut off. But I don't think we need a separate— I wouldn't want a separate check doing those things necessarily. I think the key signover, you can put complete key signover, get key signover document signed because they sign a document.

That sounds important.

Nailed it that time.

Just want to point it out. I'm a quick learner. All right. So we could add, you know, Detailed instructions here if we wanted to do that. I'll mention that this little hand, this little hand like, stop, that means that when you're actually running this process, the next item won't appear until the prior item is completed. So in other words, when you run this and you get to the stage, the only thing you're going to see at first is the first item. And as soon as you complete that, the next item will show up. And as soon as you complete that, the next item will show up. That's optional. You can uncheck all these and then when you get to the stage, all of these tasks will show up as like to-dos right away. Yeah. Um, so it's kind of a, it's either like personal preference or if there's some things where like you simply can't do this one until this one's completed, then it would make sense to have to leave that on.

Does this software have a mobile app where, where if, if somebody was going through the checklist on their phone and they could see the instructions for particular step relatively easily? Is that possible with LeadSimple?

Um, they've got, I believe the, this site itself is like mobile friendly, responsive, whatever the right lingo is for that. Right. So reactive. Yes. Um, I believe they have an app, but I don't actually use it, so I can't confirm that.

Okay. I was just curious.

We've got people in the chat.

There is an iOS app for iPhone.

There we go.

But there is not an Android app.

Well, that's unacceptable. No, no, I'm not switching phones.

I'm still getting it. Okay, cool. Okay, so after you complete this stuff, let me delete this extra one that was blank. Do we want this to sort of stay here? Or do we want, as soon as all of these tasks are completed, it goes to— like, do you have any lingering items that you do sort of post-move-in over the next couple weeks? Maybe like uploading utility shutoffs. Okay, so we'll, we'll have this move automatically to the remaining items stage, um, and then we'll go in and we will add that utility shutoffs scheduled here. How about like renter's insurance? You do anything with that?

You know, we use a resident benefit package program where everybody's on it, so I don't, don't worry about it.

So there's no, no action required by you. It's automatically handled.

Yeah, I don't actively monitor that, and nor do I have to.

What about an owner notification to let the owner know that a move-in has occurred?

You know what? Um, that's, those are the kind of things that'd be a great thing to do, particularly if there's a way to automate it to where the owner gets—

yeah, heck yeah. So if we go to General, we'll create the other role now. So I'll click Add Contact Role. I'm going to call this Owners. I'll select Building and Rental Owners here, and I'll remember to click the checkbox this time. See, I told you I'm a quick learner. All right, then we go back to, um, Stages and Workflows. Remaining items, and we'll just do, we'll do an email here. Um, notify owners of successful move-in, and we will select owners and we'll create a little template. So here's the, the other template we had already created. We're going to click create new. Uh, what was the, what did you tell me to do last time, Kelly?

Um, put parentheses and owner so that it's identified as an owner message.

How about brackets? What do we think about brackets?

You can call it brackets.

Go with it. I like the brackets. Colons. Oh, that's crazy talk.

Let's do those little curvy ones.

What are those called?

No, no, just colons on the right. Oh, okay. Hey, my question is, obviously this email is coming through LeadSimple, but will it show up in your case in your Buildium communications to that owner?

Um, no, it will not show up in your building communications. No, I was just curious, but it will show up in your Gmail if you link up your Google, your G, if you link up your email account to LeadSimple, it will show up in your outbox, whatever your linked email account is in your LeadSimple.

So, um. Well, Gmail, yes. But for those lead simple people like Jordan, that would be a great idea for it to link to your property management or property accounting software in the future.

Oh man, Jordan's catching strays here on my little workshop.

That's what it gets for showing up. We had a question in the chat. Can we create a subtask in the step instruction? One, to verify if the process is done or to create a checklist. For example, let's say before meeting a tenant, we need to make sure to take the keys, mail, main door, and any other keys, garage door clickers, etc. Um, unfortunately, no, there's not a way to do subtasks, but you can create additional tasks within the workflow, which is typically how people are leveraging that. So if you need to have a key task and then you can list what tasks, what keys are needed, or create custom fields for that. You can put custom fields, which we haven't talked about at all yet, in your information task to capture more information.

Yep. So Chris, did you sort of follow what I did there with the owner email that I set up here? Yep. So you can, again, you can turn the lightning bolt on if we want it to go automatically, or we can just leave it off if you want to sort of like sanity check everything before you send it.

I wanted to be automatic. It would just be whenever, but I wouldn't want it tied to utility shutoffs, so I'd have to probably shuffle those things around.

There you go. Yep. Okay. What else on, uh, what else on a move-in process can we make easy for you?

Um, gosh, I mean, as far as the move-in, that's pretty much what, what I've just got jotted down. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with stuff. But, um, there was one question that I had for you, and I, I just spaced on it, so give me a second. Um, oh, in terms of implementing something like this, if you go— would go back in time, would you just do one process, develop one process, use it for a month or two with you and your staff before you go creating the other ones, and just just play with the system and see how it works out? Or did you go all in and create your move-ins, your move-outs, your new leases, your renewals, and all the myriad things?

So when you're first starting out, I would create one process start to finish, really, really, really fast and simple like I just did. Yeah. And go live with it with your team and use that for a couple weeks or like it depends how fast you're, like, if you only do 3 move-ins a month, you may wanna run it for a month or 2. Yeah. But if you're doing 5 a week, then you may only need a week. So like what basically you need to get some, you need to get some cycles, you need to get some feedback. And so every time you run this for the first while, you're gonna realize like, oh shoot, like this is not the right order. Like you just mentioned the order of these, you're gonna realize, oh, this should be in part of this stage and this actually needs to be tied to this other thing and like, there's gonna be a really, I think it's kind of fun, like a fun iterative process. Yeah. Where you're improving and you're fixing and you're seeing little typos and you're like, some people want to get really picky with like, okay, every, like the name of the task, every letter we need proper case. Or like I get really sometimes worked up about like verbiage, like should every task be like past tense? With the name, or is it like, should this be like schedule utility shutoff? You know, like, is it like telling you what to do or you check it off when you're done? What do you think? I don't know. Kelly, do you ever think about this?

I think about it and then I realize that it really doesn't matter at all. And so I stop thinking about it.

That's probably— I kind of do the same thing.

Does it keep you up at night? In the night? That's what I want to really know.

No, well, not anymore. Maybe it used to.

So a couple of things that I want to say here. One is, great job so far, Peter. Another thing is we have a question in the chat about conditional logic. Can you show how conditional logic works for our viewers at home?

Yes. So Oh, where's conditional logic? Conditional logic is in here somewhere. So you, so this little like branching looking thing here is, is how you set up conditional logic in LeadSimple. So let's pretend that some of your properties are just like the utilities are always in the owner's name and it, you ne— and like you never mess with the, the residents don't have to do anything with utilities. So, in that case, you wouldn't want this to show up as part of this process, right, Chris? Still there, Chris?

Can you hear me?

Oh, yeah. Yep. Yep. Do you have any properties like that?

You know, I don't have any that are completely, but go ahead and show like it is because I—

Yeah. So, in that case, you would click this little conditional thing and see where it says display task when. And you can change this with to be any condition is true or all conditions are true. And then here we could do like, um, property groups is— this is like a— we have a property group called RL for the properties that we own personally, but you could create a property group in your property accounting software that's called utilities stay in owner's name. And in that case, if this condition was true, then— so actually, we would want this to be— you know, you may get sort of get the logic right, whether it's inverse of this or not. But so when you have this turned on, it will use this logic to decide whether or not to display this when you actually run the process. And so depending on when you run the process, it'll ask you to select a property to associate it with, and depending on whether that property is part of that property group or not, it will display this task or not. Does that make sense?

It does.

Yeah, you can also create a custom field that is a question. So let's say that you want to ask the question, does the owner have utilities always in their name? You can create a custom field that's utilities in owner's name. You can decide if it's multiple choice or if it's a number value or if it's a— what kind of answer it's going to be. As you can see Peter doing right now, where's this field showing up? So he's creating in that side tab of custom fields. You go into this side custom fields, and that's where you create any of your custom field values that you want for your, for your process. So then you go back into your process and you can input those into the instructions section of any task. And then as you're seeing here, he's saying if the utilities in owner's name is no, then we're going to show that task.

Exactly. That's it.

Yep. Nancy, does that answer your question? If you can confirm.

How good is their training program with LeadSimple? I can see this takes some time and practice to get this thing right.

Yeah, it's really good. And you don't need to use these custom fields to get started. That's— I'm glad we showed it because it's really powerful. And for those of you in the audience who haven't been exposed to that before, I know that your wheels are already turning and you're getting really excited about what you can do with custom fields. And— but you don't need them. You don't need them. Like, look at what you're using now. Yeah. So like, there's no custom fields here, but you're running a successful management company. So you don't need custom fields. I think the real power is just getting started and getting, getting running with a process, even if it's just like a copy paste from what you were using before. Part of that, so like you can get familiar with the system and start to like make those tweaks and changes that we were talking about. But the other part of this too is you want to get your team comfortable with this. And if there's all kinds of custom field logic and all these different things that are happening automatically, your team is going to be kind of confused and scared, and they're going to bounce off the tool and start defaulting to using what they were using before. So when you start, especially for that first process, you want to keep it really, really simple. Get your team warmed up to it, get them excited about how they can see the status of everything and like things are getting automatically assigned and some of the other basic parts of the tool. And then as they start to use it, they get more comfortable with it. That's when you can go in and start adding more and more power and more processes and more automations and all the fun stuff that Kelly and I geek out at when we talk at conferences. Gotcha.

No, that's great.

Okay, so We had another question that I just answered in the chat, but just wanna highlight it here. Is there a way to automate the email template in a way to replace the tenant name based on the tenants who currently signed the lease? The answer is yes, it'll be triggered off of if you have your integration turned on with your property management software, then it'll be triggered off of who the current leases are on that lease agreement. So those names can be imported in through custom fields.

Yeah. So like right here in this welcome email I did earlier, this little insert merge tag thing, we can select, um, the tenant's name somewhere, tenant first name, and then it does like a mail merge and it will, uh, it'll show up properly in their, in their inbox. And this, there's a lot you can do with these merge tags. Um, you can have like, it's got the property name, the property address. All of your custom fields are accessible in here. You've got the tenant's name, you've got the owner's name, email, all that other stuff. It's really, really powerful. Okay.

I would also say kind of going back to, do you build all of your processes out and then launch with your team? Do you build one? I totally agree with Peter that you, you build one, you launch that, you battle test it, you get everybody comfortable with using the tool. Once everybody's comfortable and trained, you can then get into this really beautiful cadence of build, test, launch. And so while you're then building your next process, you're testing the one you did before, you've just launched the one you did before that, and it just becomes this really lovely cycle to get that forward momentum. But you have to start with that first, battle test it, have transparent, open conversations with your team. Um, find out what they hate so that you can, you can get their buy-in.

Yeah, no, that's great.

So any lingering— we are— that, uh, hour and 50 minutes went by really fast. Um, Chris, any lingering questions about this process that we've built with you, for you? Anything we missed? Anything that you're sort of like uncomfortable with or don't really understand?

I don't know. I mean, it seems pretty straightforward. I just need to sit down and put some long thoughts into all the very various different move-ins that I've done and see the variations and see how best to structure it. But it seems pretty straightforward, and I look forward to exploring how I can automate as much of this as possible, or at least get get it such that at least people are queued. Hey, this needs to be done now.

Exactly. Yep. So if we click live mode, then we can— I want to actually create an instance of this process so you can see what that looks like. So if I click— so here we are in kind of the dashboard view for this process. I'll show you one thing too. This view process button. Shows you, um, we, there's a few things we didn't do here. Actually, let me do a couple of things. So let's go back to the stages and workflows. When we complete the remaining items, let's move to completed move-in automatically. That'll make it a little smoother. And let's delete this holding stage since we're not using it. Okay. So now if we go back to the dashboard and we click view process, It gives you like a graphic showing, um, the stages. Yeah. The least signed, we didn't set up that, uh, that automatic move forward. But, and then if you click on any of these, it'll show you the steps that are associated with that stage. And so this is a really nice way to just sort of, and this becomes more powerful when you have a more complex process cuz it, the visual nature of it is helpful. And it's also just like a really nice way to see the overview of what all's in there. Right. So if we click start process, so let's just, we'll just pick a property. I'm not going to add the owners or the tenants because I don't want to accidentally email them. Um, but I will. Click start. It makes me select a due date. So we'll do like 30 days out. So here is the— here we are on the first stage of the new process that we just made for you for this sort of fake property that we made. And you can see it's telling us to enter the security deposit. And we have the instructions. I can click to view those. And if I check this off, it's going to pop up the next task that I need to do. Because remember, we have the stop sign, the hand stop thing for all of these. So as I click these off, the next one, the next one's going to appear. And then we can also click around and go to the next stage either by doing this dropdown or we can click here and we can see the tasks that we created are showing up here.

So you can jump ahead if you know you've done something already in advance and you just wanted to get it off the radar.

Okay. Yep, exactly. So here's the email I was talking about. Um, it's probably not happy because I don't have my email account linked in LeadSimple, I don't think. But, um, this is where it would pop up and you'd be able to see like a preview of the email that would be going out to the owner.

And if you click that, that would be firing that email off.

If you click it, I think it pops up a preview and then you can click send if I remember.

Got you.

Okay. Nice. Yep. So that's it. So in an hour, less than an hour, we basically took, you know, what you had documented here. We built it out in LeadSimple, but again, you could use another tool and do similar. Uh, we kept it simple. We weren't too picky about the stage names or the task names. Um, and we understood that it was totally fine if we wanted to change these around, rename them, reorder them. And today, Chris, like if you signed up with LeadSimple, you could start using this with probably a few small changes and get your team bought into it and just start running with it. And that's really, that was the whole goal here is to just show that this doesn't need to be like a 2-week scary, big, hard thing. You can just, you can just do it.

Yeah. No, no, I appreciate it.

Thank you both. All right. So we have a little bit of time left. Um, let me figure out how to stop sharing. Um, I think Kelly, let's take a few minutes and talk about like the team buy-in part, cuz that's a really important part of launching with process. What have you seen that really helps teams? Cuz one thing to get the owner bought in, you know, if you're watching this webinar, you're probably fairly bought in, but how about the team? How do we get them excited?

There's a couple of components that I've seen be more successful. Typically what you want is somebody who's gonna champion this. You need somebody on your team that is the owner. They become the expert. They're the one that is kind of leading the charge and, um, getting the most excited about it. You get somebody on your team excited about this and they wanna take some ownership over it. Um, that's gonna change the dynamic completely of how other people on your team perceive it. It's totally different coming from an owner than it is from one of the team members that's like, oh my gosh, I just started using this thing and it's so cool. And it's everything that, you know, my boss told me it was going to be, or the owner told me it was going to be. Uh, you get that excitement fueled and launch. Don't, don't wait till it's perfect, but set proper expectations. Tell people this isn't perfect. We're not going for perfect. We're just going for getting something going, we will make those tweaks, those, those adjustments as we go and follow through and make that true. So I like to keep a spreadsheet that is shared across the team of this is the, the workflow, this is the task, and this is the improvement that I'm asking so that as you go through the workflow, if there are things as a team member that you want to have a voice about and say, hey, this isn't working exactly how it should, or the timing is wrong, or This isn't Charlie's task, this is Sally's task. They can give that feedback and that going back to that person, that's that owner, they can then make those adjustments that it keeps, keep that cycle going of, of creating something that people will use.

Yep. And what you're gonna find is that when you introduce this to your team, there may be someone who gets really excited about it and it may not be who you expect. Uh, there's just like certain people's brains are wired to where this makes total sense to them and they get the efficiency and they get the automation and they, they love it. And so I hope that happens for you and like lean into that and empower that person, you know, with some, with some guardrails. But that can be a really beautiful thing cuz all of a sudden, like they couldn't be more excited than to build out the rest of the processes at your company. And tune them and get them automated and all this fun stuff. So you may be surprised that you don't have to do a lot of the work once you introduce this to your team.

Yeah, it also might freak people out. I've seen a lot of teams that go through a cycle where people are worried their jobs are going to be gone, that they're going to be obsolete, that they're not going to be needed anymore, or they feel like this is undervaluing the contribution they make to the team. And so having some reassurance and those talking points and ripping the bandaid off, the first thing we do when we implement any new technology is we have a team meeting and we talk through it. And it's take off your owner hat and just listen and give them the opportunity to have real feedback and voice their concerns and their excitement and everything else. Just so you air it all and then you know what you're working with. But having that transparent dialogue and Knowing that this might freak some people out is really, really important. Have those proper expectations. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, knowing that this is, this is not to create efficiencies to make them obsolete. Exactly. It's to create efficiencies so that they don't have to do the mundane repetitive things that they don't have to anymore. They can focus on highest and best use of their unique capabilities.

I forget where I first heard this, but the mantra is automate the ordinary so you can personalize the extraordinary.

Oh, I love that.

So if your team is spending a quarter of the time that they used to on your basic move-in and move-out processes, now they have a lot of extra time to spend on the resident experience or, you know, improving the lease renewal process or finding and leasing properties faster for your owners. Like, there's a lot of things that only a human can do. There's no reason that we can't take advantage of computers to automate a lot of the sort of repetitive work that is part of property management.

And I think just that, that factor of covering your liabilities too, you now have a repeatable process that you can prove that you followed the same process for everyone regardless of their protected classes. And so this is also a protection for your staff, for all of your employees, for your 1099s, whomever is working in this system to be able to feel that validation that they're covered, that there's something that's backing them in that documentation component on those daily tasks.

Yep. So last question for you, Kelly, which parts of that process that we built today would you start to automate?

Oh, what would I automate? Um, I would probably automate anything that has to do with documents. Um, I would probably automate scheduling your move-in appointment, have a date field that we can then just have that zap out to my calendar. Um, I would probably automate, I mean, I'd obviously automate all of the interactions and even text messages to remind people for appointments coming up. There are steps that I would probably add, things like welcome gifts and activating portals and those types of things. But yeah, I think those are my big ones or triggering somebody to go do that. No, those are the, those are the big things. Great. Document storage. If you're storing documents both in your property management software and in a separate software, or if you still have old school spreadsheets that you're updating, all of that would be automated as well. That's where we see a lot of teams using automation is updating spreadsheets, storing documents, sending notifications out to key team members at key times.

Love it. Uh, I just dropped a link a few moments ago into the chat where it's actually a copy of the template that we built. So LeadSimple has the ability to share processes. So I just clicked share and made it public. So anyone who clicks on that link, you'll get the ability to import and use that exact template that you saw me build. So if that's helpful, take it, use it. Glad to share that. And then I also dropped a link to your website, Kelly, if folks wanna follow up with you about process consulting.. And then I also dropped a link for LeadSimple if you want to sign up and check out LeadSimple. Um, any final thoughts? Um, I plan to do more of these workshops. So if you thought this was helpful, let me know. And if you have feedback on how it could be better or even more helpful or useful, I'd love to hear that too. So we can make these better as we go. Um, I've got plans to do like the move out process, the lease renewal process, the new property process. I really want to like show everyone and empower folks with, uh, with process, cuz that's kind of like my first love in property management is, is getting the processes documented and, and, uh, in some type, some type of a workflow software. I think every, I want every property management business owner to be able to experience that. And so that's kind of my goal with these workshops.

And these process tools are just getting better and better all the time. And so the, the more that you invest the time now, it's going to be time savings, it's going to be money savings, it's going to be energy savings. It's gonna help with burnout. It's going to help with being able to stay competitive in this crazy world we call property management. As more technology comes on board, um, this is that key piece that keeps you from having 16 tabs open on your computer. Because those integrations and those other things that you can do as you evolve your process over time, this is a really key piece to a successful property management company, especially if you have goals to scale.

Yep. So thank you, everybody. Let me shout out Crane. It's a paid private community I run for property management business owners. We help folks transform their business so they can take a month off, which I do every June., and process automation is a big part of that. I also wanna thank LeadSimple for helping host and organize this and lend a hand with a lot of the backend stuff. Go check out Kelly's website, check out LeadSimple. Thank you everybody, and we'll hopefully see you for the next one. Thanks everyone. Bye all.