DGS 117: Brand Standards and Rising Expectations in the Market

Not tech-savvy? Afraid to use technology to meet elevated brand standards at scale? Are you willing to manage and centralize chaos by leveraging automation and mobile functionality for those maintaining and caring for your properties?

Today, I am talking to Tucker Cohen of Breezeway, which brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space. By combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management, Breezeway makes it easy for managers to deliver the best experience for guests, tenants, and owners.

You’ll Learn…

[03:05] Problems Solved: Breezeway helps property management business owners when short- or long-term tenants move out to determine condition of property.

[05:15] Breezeway Bio: Created by FlipKey founder and acquired by TripAdvisor. Breezeway uses 75+ years of industry experience to build the future of property care.

[07:00] Systemize business to be more effective and save time for brand standards and rising expectations in the market.

[10:23] Conferences and Companies: What does a conference need? Everything a business needs. Company growth and expansion doesn’t always make things easier.

[14:45] What are brand standards and rising expectations? People and perceptions are extensions of your brand. Trust and transparency meet standards and expectations.

[21:25] Dating Analogy: Am I the person that the person I want to attract into my life or into my business, would they be interested in me? Come down to their level or level up.

[23:05] Running a Business: If something isn’t working, it’s your fault. Take ownership, don’t blame your team that is following your lead.

[27:20] Expectations tend to rise, but sometimes expectations are artificially wrong, unrealistic, unmanageable, and express entitlement.

[29:22] Situational Sayings: If nothing changes, then nothing changes. If you want dramatically different results, dramatic changes are required.

[30:59] Status Quo Challenge: Some people aren’t ready for change. Ultimately, everyone moves toward an operations tool, like Breezeway.

[36:00] Platform Integrations: Breezeway strives to be a connected system, but wants to work with Rent Manager and others.

[38:35] Three-Legged Stool: Cleaning, inspection, and maintenance of property care and operations.

Tweetables

Resources

Breezeway

Tucker Cohen’s Email

Tucker Cohen on Twitter

Tucker Cohen on LinkedIn

FlipKey

TripAdvisor

Todd Breen

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

Rent Manager

EZ Repair Hotline

Property Meld

Latchel

DoorGrowClub Facebook Group

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowLive

DoorGrow Website Score Quiz

DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator

Transcript

Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.

DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

Today, I am hanging out here with Tucker Cohen. Tucker, welcome to the show.

Tucker: Thanks a lot, Jason. That was fantastic. For some reason, I thought that was recorded. I didn’t know you did that a lot.

Jason: I just say it each time. Sometimes, I screw it up even though I wrote it.

Tucker: It’s perfect, you nailed it.

Jason: I’m reading it. I think I haven’t memorized, I probably do, but I read it because even I get nervous doing my own show sometimes. Tucker, we’re going to get into Breezeway and our topic today is brand standards and rising expectations in the market. Give us a little bit of background before we get into the topic at hand. Tell us a little bit about what is Breezeway and maybe we can dig in more into that as we move through the topic.

Tucker: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m glad that we’re able to reconnect since Orlando, probably like a month ago now. I’m super excited to be here. It’s interesting. The topics are largely in line with what we’re up to. I doubt that’s much of a coincidence, but what Breezeway aims to do is allow property managers, like the ones you’re talking about, the ones who aren’t afraid to adopt technology, go out on a limb, and do something first, to meet those elevated brand standards at scale.

The way we’re doing that is through leveraging automation, through leveraging mobile functionality for folks in the field who are helping maintain and care for your properties. Without getting too much into it, I’d say that we’re really in line with that brand standard piece you mentioned.

Jason: Cool. I want to touch on this before we could move on, but what problems does Breezeway really solve? Property management business owners are struggling with what? They would be really interested in having a conversation with you.

Tucker: I think there’s a number of different ways to answer that with regards to the folks who I think are probably tuned in now. It’s going to be more aligned along the lines of when someone moves out or when someone checks out of one of your properties, be it long-term or short-term, you don’t necessarily know the condition that the property was in when they got there.

With Breezeway, we have a system of record for every single detail down to the serial number of your appliance when someone checked in and every item into a certain room or a certain part of the house that often goes unnoticed or you have an owner coming in to check-in, I think it’s just managing the chaos would probably be the best way to describe what we’re helping folks with.

Jason: Now, my initial gut reaction hearing this is that sounds like a lot of work, of data entry and getting all these things, just to go around to each unit and feed all this stuff in. How do you deal with that objection that people are probably, I’m sure it’s come up. That sounds like a lot of time.

Tucker: Totally. With any of this type of stuff, you get what you put into it. If you’re willing to go through the due diligence upfront, make sure that everything is set up right, and you have all your property information in the system, then it pays dividends down the line where you don’t have to go digging through a Google Drive with hundreds of different files about your serial number on the microwave, that property number 150. That stuff is all there anyway. The only difference is that it’s just buried somewhere, whether it’s an email thread, a text chain with a cleaner, an inspector at your property, or a maintenance guy. You have most of this information anyway. What we’re doing is we’re centralizing everything in there under one hood.

Jason: Got it. Now I’m going to read a little bit of that bio that we received when getting ready for the show because I think it makes you guys sound pretty credible and I want you guys to look really good. Breezeway brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space, combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management.

We make it easy for managers to deliver the best experience of guests, tenants, and owners. We are serving a global customer base across a broad set of verticals, including short-term vacation managers, residential property managers, cleaning and maintenance providers, hospitality operators. This was created by the founder of FlipKey which was acquired by TripAdvisor. The Breezeway team is using 75-plus years of industry experience to build the future of property care.

What you’re working on is you are directly with the sales team. You’re building the sales team inside that. This says, “Having skilled companies from series A to unicorn status in the past.” What does that mean? Explain that to me.

Tucker: That’s, of course, like privately-held software company jargon right there, but basically, what that means is a company that’s pre-Series A, like us here at Breezeway, means we’ve raised a very small round of money. In the future, we may raise a Series A, which is more of an initial investment, proper venture capital raise, and then all the way up to unicorn status, which is commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as a billion-dollar valuation for the company.

Jason: Okay. Let’s get into the top of your hand. Brand standards and rising expectations in the market. This sounds like you guys are primed for growth. It sounds like you guys have a really cool technology in place that’s going to do some stuff for property managers to help them systemize their business.

I think you could answer my question better in saying that it’s going to help them save time in the long run, right? It’s the bottom of the line. There’s some time that it takes to get this stuff set up initially, but it’s going to save you the hassle of all this time in the long run. Overall, it’s not costing you time.

Tucker: Yeah, you got it.

Jason: There you go.

Tucker: Most folks are already doing a lot of this stuff anyway.

Jason: They’re just doing it poorly.

Tucker: Again, you said it, not me.

Jason: Most things in most businesses. I get to see on the inside of hundreds of companies and everything’s shiny on the outside. It could be shinier. We can help you with that, by the way, property managers. It could be shinier on the outside, but the challenges on the inside, that’s like the whited sepulcher they talked about in the Bible like, “How’s everything going?” “Oh, it’s great,” but they’re drowning. That’s businesses on Instagram. Everything looks pretty and is great but really business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough.

A smart entrepreneur I’d spoken with today on a sales call said, “What’s your internal organization like? How do you run your own business?” I just started telling him because us, entrepreneurs, we know what it’s like to run a company. It feels like herding cats sometimes, it feels like chaos, wrapping some constraints around that and moving the business forward towards scaling towards growth takes work. You help manage some of the herding of the cats information-wise.

Tucker: There you go. Absolutely. To that point, it’s such an interesting timing. I actually just started listening to this other podcast called Under The Waterline. Have you heard of that one?

Jason: No, but Under The Waterline? Like drowning?

Tucker: It’s pretty straightforward, but all about what you’re saying. Everybody tells the story. When a company goes well, all you hear is the above the waterline, which is clean, beautiful, and nothing ever went wrong. I’m drawing a blank on the host. I only listened to a couple of episodes far, worth checking out.

He digs and he interviews with entrepreneurs, and talks about “Tell me the honest take. What happened here? How did you do this? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it ugly?” really digging in on that under the waterline grit that it takes to successfully build a company like you’re talking about.

Jason: Yeah. I’ve made all kinds of mistakes. I jokingly tell people that DoorGrow has been built on thousands of failures, I mean really. I did a conference back in November and some of the listeners were probably at this conference. We had 150 attendees. This was our inaugural event. It was phenomenal. We had amazing food. We had great speakers.

Here’s the dirty secret about doing that conference. People were like, “Why aren’t you doing it again this year?” I thought it’d be this great thing, our business is healthy, we’re doing about $1 million in revenue, we’ve had 300% growth, then like, “Let’s do a conference this year.”

Tucker: Why not?

Jason: The thing about starting a conference, property managers can compare this to—if they’re in residential going into commercial, or deciding to start in a new market, deciding to do associations, or whatever it might be—some expansion and they think this will be easy. There’ll be just this other thing. This other thing was like starting a whole new company because what does a conference need? Everything a business needs: sales, marketing, branding positioning, lots and lots of organization, everything that a business needs. It was like starting another company.

Guess how much growth we had the year that we were doing a conference? No growth. We had no growth for a year. We were healthy-ish but we weren’t growing ironically. Our company is called DoorGrow, but it was because we were distracted because everything had to go towards this conference. Once you decide to do a conference, you’re all in. You’re on the hook with the hotel, you’ve got vendors, people sold tickets, there’s no going back.

There are lots of companies that have gone bankrupt just for doing a conference. I was like, “How was that possible? No.” We’re […] than that. Not me, no. That’s every business owner starting company. “I’ll be better than all those other property management businesses. They all suck but that won’t be me.” I hear that all the time. “I’m starting a property management business because all the other companies in my market suck.” I hear that every week and they won’t be that one.

Tucker: What you’re talking about, too, Jason is just like spending your time efficiently and effectively. If you are a small shop, you can’t really afford to necessarily make mistakes like that with where you’re allocating your time. In your case, it was a conference that did it. You did it, you pulled it off but someone who, like you’re saying—

Jason: Yeah, everybody loved it, everyone’s like, “It was so great,” and I didn’t love it. It was super stressful because I’m somewhat introverted. I’m an ambivert but that situation was incredibly uncomfortable for me because it was just so much pressure. But it went off well, everybody had great feedback but it cost me $2 million in opportunity cost easily.

Tucker: No ROI there.

Jason: I could do a conference that cost tons of money, broke even sort of thing. The conference probably cost $120,000 just to throw because we did everything great but the opportunity cost, the fact that my team were all focused on it, and everything else instead of on the main thing. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to remember in our business, the main thing is the main thing. If your business needs sales and revenue, then that’s what you need to focus on, otherwise, you end up with a sales slump and then you’re scrambling.

The main thing has to stay the main thing in the business. That was a huge lesson that I got from that. I got to make sure the main thing always stays the main thing. Entrepreneurs, we’re always tempted by opportunity and there’s always a distraction, there are always new options, opportunity, and distraction, whether it’s expanding into a new market as a property manager or something. Keeping focused is power.

Tell me what are brand standards? Rising expectations? Let’s get into this.

Tucker: I have a hot take on brand standards. I think it’s a pretty lukewarm take, I think it’s pretty straightforward, but it’s really like, “This is what your expectation is.” There’s this sociological theory, which is that there are three versions of you. There’s you as you see yourself, there’s you as other people see you, and there’s a version of you that you think other people see as you. It’s your projection of what people’s perception is. It’s one thing from a personal standpoint, but from a business standpoint, you actually can control that in a lot of ways.

That’s what we’re talking about with brand standards. You have expectations as an entrepreneur, as the CEO of your own company, you expect things to be done a certain way. How do you make sure that the people who you’re trusting to impact your business, whether it’s someone taking photos of your property for a posting, for listing, cleaning your property, or inspecting your property before someone checks in or moves in? Those people are extensions of your brand. You’re effectively trusting them to meet those standards. A lot of times, you don’t necessarily have insight into that but maybe that was a hot take.

Jason: Yeah. I’ll add to that. Branding is one of the main things that we have property management businesses with. I consider myself a branding expert. This is something that I dealt with in helping clean up the branding for hundreds of property management companies. We’ve helped some vendors even recently.

We helped clean up Virtually Incredible’s branding. We helped clean up their new logo. It was designed by my team. I had some great conversation with Todd Breen on helping him focus on the main gateway that was feeding his business and recognize that other things were back-end products that came later in the sales cycle, instead of putting out the message that he did everything, which one feeds the business. I think property managers need to recognize that, too.

Property management is often the front-end gateway product even if they also do real estate. It works more effectively usually that way. I think they need to focus on that, but a lot of property management businesses in the branding are real estate companies, which scares off the people that want a specialist. They want a specialist that manage their biggest investment ever. I’ve helped double some property management businesses’ real estate revenue commissions by eliminating real estate from their branding, ironically, because once the property management side is healthy, it’s what’s feeding them the majority of the revenue that’s coming into that.

It goes back again to focus. We can tie this back in, but it goes back again to focus that in order to deal with people’s expectations and in order to manage the perception of your business, I think the key is that you need to align it towards what starts the process, not towards everything that you do.

I’m dating now. Imagine that you’re in the process of dating, you’re going out, and you just vomit everything about yourself and what you do. You can’t do that. You got to start with where’s their interest level at. Start in that space first. “Oh, you’re into music? Me too.” You have to start somewhere. There has to be a beginning.

The same thing with our businesses, there has to be a beginning because you […] what you’re doing. You’re trying to create a relationship and you can parallel this to dating, but you’re not going to show up and try to make out with them on the front porch as soon as you meet them. That’s what people try to do in sales a lot of times. They just vomit everything right on their lap, they’re in a state of overwhelm, and they’re like, “Okay, that’s a bit much, buddy.”

I think also with branding, transparency is so huge. You said something that I felt anxious just hearing you talk about the expectations with yourself, with others, and then what you think others are perceiving. That can be such a big head game that people get caught up in. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how are people perceiving me? Am I okay? Do they like me? Am I being right for them? Am I doing this?”

Ultimately, as we get older, we learn to just not give an F. You don’t care as much because you become more confident, you love yourself, you like yourself. When your business is confident, when you’re confident in your business, and you’re confident your business can deliver, you come from a greater space in which you can be the prize that the client is trying to get instead of thinking that they’re the prize.

This is called prizing in sales. I think it happens when you’re transparent because transparency creates safety, it creates trust, you don’t have to try and be something. The problem is, a lot of times, the brand is not in alignment with what’s on the back end, what’s on the inside. It’s not in alignment with the business owner.

Tucker: That brings up two great points. One is you say in your personal life, you grow up and you’re just like, “Yeah, I don’t really care. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” What we’re talking about here, unfortunately, is a place where we don’t have that luxury. We’re talking about the rising expectations that are taking place across every element of property management and then the brand standards.

Jason: Due to increases in technology. People have iPhones. If they have iPhones, they expect more.

Tucker: It’s one thing to say, “Yeah, this is who I am, take it or leave it,” but if it’s your business, you say that, and you provide a bad experience, that’s where I think branding really comes down to is the experience that your client ends up having when they engage with you, be it at the very beginning of your relationship or throughout the lion’s share of it all the way to the end.

Jason: Yeah. Let’s go back to the dating analogy. If I’m overweight, I’m not getting my hair cut, I’m not brushing my teeth, and I just grow my beard down to my ankles, and I just say, “Screw everybody else, this is how I am. Take it or leave it.” That’s cool, I will only attract people that are interested in that. That might not be what I’m interested in.

Here’s the thing. I love this question, “Am I the person—that the person I want to match with, or attract into my life, or into my business—they would be interested in? Am I at that level? If not, I even need to lower my expectations or I need to make some changes.”

Tucker: Right, either come down to their level or you level up. That’s it.

Jason: Right. Either way, I need to get in touch with reality. I need to make some changes. A great question that I’ve had several coaches I’ve seen throw out or coaches I’ve worked with ask is, “Who do I have to become in order to be that person? Who do I have to become? What would it take? Who do you, as a property management business owner, have to become in order to have the type of business that you want?” Here’s the thing. One of my coaches said, “If you don’t have the business yet that you dream of, you’re not yet the person that can run it yet.

Tucker: That’s meta.

Jason: That’s meta. Right, that’s really simple. If you don’t have the business that you dream of, you feel like it’s not right, and you’re frustrated with your team, you’re not the person yet that can create that. But as entrepreneurs, it’s so easy for us to externalize all of that. I get many people come to me and they want to focus on their website, they want to focus on lead gen, they want to blame their team. Everything is external.

The ironic thing that I found is if I can get them to focus on themselves, get clarity on who they are, what really makes them feel alive and in momentum as entrepreneur, they get really clear on their purpose, then we align the brand, the business, everything around that, everything changes. The website’s going to end up changing, their messaging is going to end up changing, their sales process changes. They fire some of their team members. Their team members change.

Everything changes in a business once the business owner, the entrepreneur at the helm who is the sun at the center of the solar system changes. Everything has to change by default. But what’s incredibly costly, time crazy, and painful is the folks trying to change everything externally without changing yourself which is really creating all that.

Tucker: Do you know Jocko Willink, the ex-Navy SEAL?

Jason: Yeah, he’s written some good books.

Tucker: He’s got the book Extreme Ownership. That’s his whole thing, it’s extreme ownership. If something’s not working out, it’s your fault. You got to take some ownership, it’s not the team’s fault. The team is following your lead. You’re the leader.

Jason: I’ll share an example. I was talking with somebody and they were complaining about all these different people that had come into their life. They were complaining about this guy, that guy, and this. I said, “Hey, there’s one common denominator among all of this. There’s one commonality.” Because they were like, “I don’t know […]. All these people are so different.” I said, “There’s one thing in common. You. That’s the one thing in common.”

The most dangerous thing in the world—property managers know this if they’ve been in the business a while—one of the biggest red flags for property manager is if somebody comes to them and says with an existing manager or they just fired their last manager and they’re complaining about their previous managers. “Oh, this company was terrible.”

The dumb property manager would listen to all of that and they would say, “Oh, yeah, they’re terrible. We’ll be way better.” The correct property manager would say, “Okay, maybe it’s this person so I better ask some really good questions before I take them on because I might be the next company that’s on their […] list that’s getting attacked on online reviews and negative. I don’t want to be that.”

That’s a red flag. Another red flag is if somebody’s referring a client to you. We can’t really help them. I teach my clients to do that, to refer the clients they don’t like to somebody else. I’m sharing this transparently, everybody. If somebody’s referring a client to you, it could mean that they’re a terrible client. Sometimes, though, it may just mean that they’re not a fit. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure when it comes to property management. Some people can deal with that difficult investor and others can’t. Some difficult investors can exchange the good ones just by setting a real strong fence and a boundary that some managers aren’t capable of doing. That’s all they wanted in the beginning, they just wanted safety. That’s another advantage you can create.

Tucker: The takeaway there, do your homework always. Larry David had a good episode on that. Don’t get foisted.

Jason: Foisted? I don’t know that term.

Tucker: I’ll send you a link. Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

Jason: All right. I’ll avoid getting foisted after I launch this episode.

Tucker: Tough referral.

Jason: Perfect. Expectations do tend to rise but sometimes, expectations are artificially wrong. I saw a post from one of my buddies who’s in the restaurant industry today. This girl wrote this note on a receipt saying, “I’m not giving you a tip because I’m only a few days away from my 21st birthday and you wouldn’t allow me to have alcohol.” No tip for their whole party, from the whole party of food.

This just shows the entitlement that exists in some people. That’s ridiculous. Sometimes some people’s expectations are unrealistic. I don’t think it’s too much for somebody to provide good service but to break the law for somebody so that they can have alcohol because, “Hey, my birthday is only a few days away,” come on.

Tucker: That’s an unrealistic expectation at its finest.

Jason: As long as it’s in the past. Yes. Some expectations are not manageable and it’s not possible for us to raise to that level of their expectation because it’s without foundation, it’s a pie in the sky, it’s a pipe dream, it’s not realistic. Now I think the challenge with property managers is there’s some things that they think, “This is a status quo, this is how we’ve done it. This is how it is. It’s just hard this way.”

They think everything else is pie in the sky or fluffy and not possible. They exclude themselves from making those changes. It’s like the guy that’s like, “Oh, all girls are just difficult. I’m just going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos all day. They only want a rich guy or they only want whatever. They just choose out.” In business is the same thing, we can just choose out.

Tucker: An all-encompassing saying for every situation you can think of is if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

Jason: Right. I’ve also heard it said if you want dramatically different results or if you want dramatic change, it requires dramatic change.

Tucker: There you go, case in point. Then, of course, another bit of jargon of rising tide lifts all ships. That’s it.

Jason: I think I touched on that one on this show before of rising tide can raise all ships if the tide is already high enough, but I think the challenge in property management is that the tide is all the way down in some areas. It’s low. There are some property management businesses with holes in them like you wouldn’t believe and they’re sitting on gravel or sand. They’re there.

A rising tide is going to sink some ships in this industry, no question, and they need to sink because it’s going to help the entire industry. There are property owners businesses that should not be in business or they’re going to have them patch up some holes and make things work better.

Tucker: I think to that point, Jason, it’s really the ones who are going to sit back and say, “This is the way we’ve always done it or this is status quo,” because frankly, at the end of the day, the customer has all the power. They’re the ones that can make or break your business with one bad review at the end of the day. […] natural selection, I think. You’re right.

Jason: Let’s apply this to Breezeway. Breezeway, what are some of the challenges that you deal with in selling your services to property managers? Some of the things that you’ll typically hear from them.

Tucker: That’s a really straightforward one, is that status quo like, “This is where we’ve always done it.” It’s not that big of a headache for us now. We don’t think we would use it that much, or what we talked about before, it might be too much work upfront. It’s okay. Some people aren’t ready for change but we stand by the fact that ultimately, everyone will move towards an operations tool like Breezeway, if not Breezeway.

In most cases, when people say no, they come back. We believe that’s going to continue to happen as this tide continues to rise and the expectations continue to rise. If you don’t have high brand standards, you don’t get to be a brand any more because (like you said) the ship sinks. If you can’t meet the customers expectations, you’re probably not going to have any customers for much longer, so the status quo.

Like we said, this isn’t stuff that people aren’t doing already in a lot of cases. They’re just running around and managing chaos in order to effectively do it. What Breezeway allows them to do is both automate as well as ensure that it’s actually happening in a way that they hope it will, meeting those brand standards.

Jason: You’ve got customers, right?

Tucker: Yeah, we have some.

Jason: Okay, good, me too. Can you share an example, a case study, or maybe even some typical situation that you’ve seen where they’ve gone from not doing it, struggling, not using Breezeway, to implementing your services, and what results they’ve been able to achieve?

Tucker: Without naming any specific clients, another big piece of pushback that we receive is, “I don’t know if my service providers will actually use this,” which is fair, generally considering the fact that service providers aren’t tech-savvy, what have you. But one of our clients down south were able to effectively roll this out to their service network. Each one of those service providers now uses our app to download all of their checklists offline.

Before, there was no good way for them to do that until they can download the apps all offline. They had pulled them and said, “Hey, would you want to go back to the old way?” which was email, paper and pen, checklist, they’re coming into the office, “Hey, here’s your assignment for the day,” or emailing them out to some of the further ones, then they had to submit them all back manually with all the photos attached, and they’re like, “Absolutely not. Of course, why would I ever want to go back to the old way?”

A bit of an anecdotal story there about some of those challenges that we’re seeing at the onset of conversations all being overcome and Breezeway being in a spot where they know no other way now.

Jason: There are a lot of tools that a lot of property managers probably shouldn’t even touch until they’re maybe about 50 to 100 units, they can’t even entertain the idea. They don’t have cash flow, they’re not ready to use a service, they’re a solopreneur maybe, at what stage do you feel like Breezeway can be implemented in a business? Where do they need to be, roughly, in terms of door count, size, who do you guys generally work with?

Tucker: Good question. It is on a case-by-case basis to some extent because some entrepreneurs, like you’re saying, have higher bandwidth for stress and they can deal with some of those chaotic nuances that go into managing a higher door count as opposed to someone like me who I like to ensure as much automation as possible so I don’t let things slip through the cracks in the first place.

The sooner I can automate, the better. Then as I scale, I have that process in place. Typical door count, from a short-term perspective, we’ll work with folks in the 50 to 100 range but all the way down to 5 doors too. Again, […] pay. They like to just automate as much as possible. In the longer-term world, we’re talking about the same, range only on the higher scale. So, 50 all the way up to 500 and 1000 doors.

Jason: Okay. They can get started with you guys at any point. You guys don’t have like 100-door minimum, 200-door minimum, or anything like this?

Tucker: No.

Jason: Okay.

Tucker: We’re not turning people away just yet, Jason.

Jason: Okay. I do but I’m picky. I’m just kidding. Tucker, this is really cool, the future sounds like technology. Does Breezeway integrate with any platforms? There are so many different tools in property management, I think a lot of people listening to my show nowadays are like, “Oh, gosh, Jason just shared another stupid tool that I’m going to have to figure out how to plug into my business that I really want,” and they’ve got this to-do list of tools they want to add and implement. How difficult is it to get started with Breezeway and is there any concern about connection, integration, or any of this thing that is really significant?

Tucker: I understand why people get concerned with this type of thing. Of course, whenever you’re introducing new technology, there’s always a concern, especially because folks (like you said) have been burned in the past like, “Oh, another one of these things I have to do.” But at Breezeway, we really aim to be a connected system. From a long-term standpoint, we’re working with the folks of the likes of Rent Manager and other folks like them.

Then short-term, all the 20-plus of the biggest PMS systems out there. But our goal by the end of this year and the coming year 2020, we’re going to just be one of the most connected systems out there, whether it’s your remote locks of the world all the way to your streamlines and your rent managers of the world as well.

Jason: Got it. People listening might get confused and think, “Is Breezeway a complementary tool to maintenance coordination tools or is it a replacement for these type of tools, where we have, maybe EZ Repair Hotline, Property Meld, and Latchel, these services?”

Tucker: Wow, that’s a loaded question, Jason. I knew you’re going to come at me with that.

Jason: It’s an obvious question.

Tucker: It is an obvious question.

Jason: I’m just asking what I know my clients are going to be like, “What is this? How does it fit in the overall mix?”

Tucker: It’s true. Listen, like I was saying before, we want to play nicely with anybody who’s out there so we’re not going to go ahead and say that we’re a direct competitor for these folks. The other thing is we do a handful of the same stuff. You’ll be hard-pressed to be using one of them for maintenance, using Breezeway for cleaning and inspections, and not using us for maintenance.

There’s a three-legged stool with regards to where Breezeway plays in the operations world and our aim is to supplement the PMS regardless of which one it is, we want to integrate with them. Then if they’re using something else for maintenance, that’s fine too.

Jason: Explain the three legs, what are they just for people that are a little bit lost.

Tucker: Yeah, sorry. I’m a big analogy guy.

Jason: Take the analogy into reality.

Tucker: Here’s the reality, you have your cleaning, inspection, and your maintenance. Those are the three legs we believe of property care and operations.

Jason: Got it. What other frequently asked questions do people have when they’re approaching you for interest in Breezeway or just any other questions that we haven’t covered?

Tucker: I don’t know, it runs the gamut. We’re creating a new category to speak of, property operation which is really something that people haven’t heard of. We’re excited about it. The main question is probably what is property operations. It’s just what I’m talking about. It’s really thinking about not just managing a property but actually caring for it and taking into consideration preventative maintenance and safety measures. All that stuff rolled into one in a way that you can do it as hands-off as possible.

Jason: Perfect. Okay. Tucker, I think we’ve talked about brand standards, we’ve talked about rising expectations in the industry, we’ve talked about Breezeway. How can people get in touch with Breezeway? How can they find out more if they want to get in touch and they’re interested?

Tucker: We are at http://www.breezeway.io. If you would like to check out our integrations page, it’s very simple /integrations. If you would like to meet with me, you can send me an email, tucker@breezeway.io, @CorpoTuck on Twitter, on Linkedin, Tucker F. C. I know a lot of folks are on Facebook, I’m thinking about getting on there, but that’s about it. Happy to fill any questions now, it looks like we’re getting some coming in on the chat.

Jason: We can touch on that. Is this available for homeowners or just landlords and property managers?

Tucker: Yeah. Listen, right now, it is primarily for landlords and property managers, but we do see a world where a longer term this will be used by homeowners and the connected home Internet of Things world of the future that we see everything sliding towards.

Jason: Someday, Breezeway may know whether my Roomba has done its job or not.

Tucker: Exactly. Your Roomba would be automatically scheduled by Breezeway.

Jason: All right. Tucker, it’s been great having you on. Everybody check out, it’s breezeway.io. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show.

Tucker: Yeah. Thanks so much, Jason. This is great. Glad we made it happen.

Jason: All right, I’ll let you go. All right, there you have it, check out breezeway.io. I’m always curious to hear your feedback on this so make sure you guys are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. This is our community for all those DoorGrow Hackers out there, property management, business owners, entrepreneurs. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com and that will take you to the Facebook group. Answer all the questions and we’ll let you in if you’re a property management entrepreneur. Get inside that group.

As always, I’d love to hear feedback on what you think about different tools, different things that you’re using, and ask questions to other people inside the Facebook group. We’ll give you some free gifts when you join that group, including a bible of fees that you can tack on your property management business. We have a list of really cool tools and vendors in there. You will get an email drip if you provided your email when you join the group. We will be giving you gifts to help you grow your property management business.

Eventually, you’ll be able to learn a little bit more about what we do at DoorGrow. Make sure you get inside that group if you’re not in our community. There are amazing people in there, they’re helpful, and they align with my vision of creating collaboration over competition. That’s what this industry needs right now. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.