DGS 124: Premature Expansion in Property Management – Part 1

premature expansion in property management part oneIf you walked out the door for a month, would the business you started survive? Would it still operate? Do you have the right people in the right roles?

Today, Jason Hull and John Ray of DoorGrow discuss the problem of premature expansion in property management. What is the best way to see consistent, comfortable growth?

You’ll Learn…

[03:25] Plateau vs. Premature Expansion: Buy new business, location, or expand to make more money:

[04:33] Debunking New Market Myths: Easier, less work, and shortcut to growth.

[07:20] Duplication: Split energy leads to struggling to successfully do double the work.

[08:43] Clone Your Competitor: Takes 10 people to duplicate tasks and do them better.

[13:00] New Locations: Avoid burnout by building a team and support to be scalable.

[15:21] Processes: If employee leaves, document tasks to prevent disconnect.

[22:55] Expansion: Continue to grow in the same, new, or additional location? .

[24:20] Systems: Plan and set monthly and annual growth targets, goals, and more.

[31:15] Process Documentation: Who does what and how to do what they do.

Tweetables

Resources

Rent Manager

AppFolio

Iceberg Report

Tony Robbins

Process Street

DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowLive

DoorGrow Website Score Quiz

DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator

Transcript

Jason: How dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah, it would be totally fine,” maybe then it’s time to open up a new location because that means you have things really dialed in, you’ve got the right people.

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, 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 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.

I’m hanging out here with someone else from DoorGrow, Jon Ray.

Jon: Thanks for having me, we’re a part of the DoorGrow growth hacker team.

Jason: We were sitting and I’m thinking, “What can we talk about?” The topic that I wanted to talk about is a common problem that I see come up. I coined a phrase for it and I don’t know that anybody else has ever talked about this phrase, but this is just what I felt like calling it. Our topic today is premature expansion in property management.

Jon: Premature expansion, tell us about it, Jason. I’ll preface it by saying I’ve been talking to a lot of our seed hackers, a lot of property managers that are a part of the Facebook group. Ultimately, everybody is trying to figure out what is the best way to seek consistent, comfortable growth. One of the things that has come up on a recurring basis on these calls is that as people are thinking about the various strategies that are available to them for growth—especially at some kind of an accelerated pace over what they’re doing—oftentimes there is a consideration if not an outward movement towards moving into another market.

As you and I were talking about that that can sometimes be a great strategy, but sometimes it can be an absolute failing strategy. Premature expansion is basically your term and how you’re packaging that concept of when that kind of expansion into another market may not be the best strategy. Can you talk about in more detail on how somebody should be thinking about whether or not they should move into another marketplace?

Jason: There’s a lot that goes into deciding whether to move into a new marketplace, or premature expansion could be even buying a new business, or a new location. It’s any sort of expansion. Usually, the motivation behind it is they want to grow, they want to make more money. Their challenge is that sometimes it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. The most common scenario—one of the most—is somebody will come in and they’ll say, “Hey, we want to buy another property management company in another market,” or “We’re going to open up a new office in another new market.”

Usually, when I ask them why, they feel like they’ve hit a plateau in their growth in their current market. This is usually what’s fueling this. They feel stuck. They were doing something that was working, they usually get to maybe the 200-400 door range and what I call the second sandtrap. Once they get into that space, they think, “Well, we got this far in this location. We’re hitting a limit or a plateau. Let’s just go duplicate that effort and do it somewhere else.”

It makes sense on the surface. It sounds so easy like, “We did it here. Maybe we tap this out. Maybe now it’s time to go to a new market.” I think there’s a lot of myths that drive that. One myth is that it’s going to be easier in another market, in the second market it will be easier. That’s almost never, ever, ever the case. The second location is always more difficult. It’s more difficult to manage, it’s more difficult to maintain. If you have a second office, you’re going to need a second set of staff. It’s just harder. It might mean that you’re doing double the amount of work as an entrepreneur trying to run two locations. Also, they think, “What worked here,” I think that’s a myth, “What worked in our first location to get us to this point might work there.”

If they’ve been in business for maybe 10 years, and they played this pay-per-click game in the beginning, or they were doing all property management leads in the beginning, and that stuff has shifted, and it’s not as easy. Things have shifted and changed, but they’re thinking, “Well, we got this far. Let’s just go do what we’re doing now over here. Maybe it will grow just as fast.” They run into some problems because fundamentally, what used to work may not be working.

Another myth is that it’s some sort of shortcut to growth, and it’s not really a shortcut. There’s a lot of challenges and difficulties. What’s easier than opening up a new location, and then trying to add more doors, and to build out basically a whole another company, essentially, is to grow where you’re at. That’s far easier.

A lot of times, when I ask them, here’s the golden question to ask yourself if you’re a person listening to this thinking, “I want to expand. Let’s open up and go into a new city.” First of all, you need to ask yourself, do you really want to be there? Do you want to drive out there? Do you want your team to be taking trips out there? Does that feel comfortable to you? Because ultimately, you can build a business that you want to have. It doesn’t have to be the business that you can do. That’s a big temptation we make as entrepreneurs is we build the business we can’t. “Oh, well we can do this. I can add this service. We can do that.” Then we get scattered. We end up diluting our effectiveness.

In the case of premature expansion, they open up a second market. What inevitably I see happen—almost every time—is their first primary location starts to suffer and struggle, and they start to lose those doors, and customer service levels drop, and there are challenges, and they’re having a more difficult time running both. Things have to be incredibly well dialed in in order to do that, to make that work.

Jon: Ultimately, what you’re talking about here is this concept of duplication. We all wish that we could duplicate ourselves so that we could do twice as much work. In entrepreneurship—in order to successfully duplicate yourself—there are some certain things that have to happen. Otherwise, that duplication just looks like split energy, and then neither of the parts are getting as much as the first whole. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what it looks like to successfully duplicate yourself.

When I was running teams at Google, and when we were thinking about whether we were going to expand into a new marketplace, we wanted to make sure that we had maximized our efforts in the current city that we were in as much as humanly possible, and we wanted to make sure that we had templatized all of our processes so that the management wasn’t directly involved in the success of the business. They were guiding strategy and vision, but they weren’t operationally necessary other than that high-level guidance. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that would look like in a property management business, and how somebody should think about that concept of duplication.

Jason: I love what you’re saying about what they would do at Google. It makes a lot of sense. What I’ve seen is in my experience in helping hundreds—maybe even thousands of entrepreneurs—is there’s always this myth that if I could just clone myself, all my hopes and dreams would come true. I know all this stuff, I can do all this stuff, and then all my hopes and dreams would come true.

Let me tell you from experience what it took to duplicate myself, because I pretty much got somebody to do every single role that I used to do in the business, and it takes probably about ten people. That’s my experience. It takes about ten people to duplicate yourself. You’re never going to find that one person that can do it all. If you do, they’re going to become your new competitor, or they’re going to go start their own business, or they’re going to leave you after they realize that they can probably do stuff better than you, just like you probably figured out back when you were working for somebody. You’re like, “I could do this better.”

That’s the e-myth—that’s the entrepreneur myth. That’s what everybody wants to do. They’re like, “I could do this.” A lot of business owners that are running businesses now they used to work for somebody, and they’re like. “I could do this.” Then they’d start learning that they need to become an accountant, and they need to become a graphic designer, and they need to become whatever. Whatever all the different roles are and the different hats that you wear.

Just like that in a property management business, if you’re going to expand into any market, you have to realize which hats are you still wearing, which seats are you still sitting in on this bus that’s the business? If you’re managing, and you’re acting as BDM, and you’re acting as the property manager, or maintenance coordinator, or any of these operationally tactical, critical roles, then the challenge is you go into the market, your life’s going to become twice as hard with another location. There’s that momentum and that inertia in getting something new going.

Training one new person makes your life twice as hard. If you’re going to build out a new team there, if you’re going to build out maybe a satellite staff, it’s still a lot more work to get that all built up. That’s why if you don’t have high leverage when it comes to systems, high leverage when it comes to the process—I think maybe that’s a good question to ask yourself is: how dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah. It’d be totally fine,” maybe then it’s time to open up a new location because that means you have things really well dialed in, you’ve got the right people.

The question is also connected to that: if you lost any single team member—think of who you think is the most critical person on your team—if they killed over and died—god forbid—or they left your business, or they went to work for a competitor, or they went to start their own property management business, how quickly would you be able to get back up to speed? Do you have all their processes defined? Do you know what they’re doing? Do you know what they do on a day-to-day basis? Do you feel like somebody else could step into that role very easily because everything’s documented? If not, opening up into a second location is dangerous because you’re not going to have all those things dialed in.

Ultimately, overwhelm is going to set in. This is the big thing for us entrepreneurs. We operate, basically, at two speeds. It’s like we’re in momentum, we’re on fire, and we feel alive, or we’re in a state of overwhelm feeling stuck, and frustrated, and stressed. If you’re already feeling stressed, and stuck, and frustrated, that’s probably not the time to go heap more on to your plate.

Jon: Just playing devil’s advocate because I think a lot of the people that I talk to in the property management space that are considering this move are like, “Well, that may be accurate advice for most people, but I’m better than most people. I was able to bootstrap where I’m at now, and I was able to scrap it altogether, and I didn’t document all of these processes. Why can’t I do the same thing for a second location?”

Maybe you can talk a little bit to me, and explain to me why it’s different from the second location? Because it is true that you can figure things out when you’re physically there in person, but as you start to satellite out, it’s a different kind of mentality that you have to take, and the bootstrapping method doesn’t work so well. Can you talk about why that is?

Jason: When you open up a business—just through sheer will of force and just personality—if somebody can sell, and somebody is driven, they can create a business. They can probably even get it up to about $1 million in revenue annually just through that. But beyond that, you have to have a team. In property management, you’re going to probably need a team long before you hit that amount in revenue, and you need support. Otherwise, it’s just not scalable. You’re going to start to burn out really quickly. This is why we see so many people get stuck in the first sandtrap, which is about 50 or 60 units. It’s the solopreneur. They’ll get stuck there.

If you’re at the place where you’re at about 200-400 units you probably got some team members, you probably at least have a maintenance coordinator, maybe a property manager, somebody helping with showings. You got some pieces in place. You’ve gotten that off your plate. That doesn’t mean now you could go up and open up a whole new location because still, tons of things are still relying on you. Just pay attention. If your team members are coming into your office, or texting you throughout the day, then you are a bottleneck in your business already. You will be even a bigger bottleneck.

My entire team, we’re virtual. If you bring on people that are at a remote office, they’re not going to be able to get their questions answered quickly, they’re not going to have the support that they need, you need to live there for at least 90 days so everybody’s on board with it, systems are in place, and be able to do that. That’s possible to build that up, but that means you need everything really well dialed in so that stuff doesn’t just gravitate towards chaos. There needs to be protections in place so that you can ensure that people are doing what needs to be done.

Jon: I want to unpack that word systems and really the phrase systems and processes because I think a lot of people—at least in the calls that I’m having with property managers—when I say systems and processes they’re like, “Oh, yeah. Well, we’re already on that folio. We already have a rent manager.” That’s actually not what you’re talking about. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Jason: When it comes to processes you need to have—here’s the way I look at it, if somebody on your team quit, fired, or died, or whatever, that means somebody else could step in, they could read a process, they would know exactly how to do it, and they’d be able to figure it out. If all the processes exist in that person’s head and your head, then I’ll tell you what, there’s a massive gap usually, or significant gaps between what you think they’re doing, and what they think they should be doing. There always is because it’s all just in their head.

We know internally at DoorGrow that this happens, and we have processes documented. There’s still a disconnect sometimes. One team member thinks, “Well, this is how I’ve been doing it. I think this is how it’s supposed to be done.” We have it documented, which is it might even be a little bit different because sometimes people don’t refer to the documentation all the time. Then there’s what the visionary or the entrepreneur thinks should be done all the time, and the team’s documented, or decided it’s being done differently. These things are in constant negotiations that need to be brought together.

You can collapse time on that by having processes that people have to actually follow, like you have to actually mark it off and complete it. There’s a checklist that they’re signing off on that they’re actually doing so that there’s some accountability that they followed those steps. There needs to be accountability in place because most people—just like learning to drive a car, you maybe read a manual once, took a test, passed the test, maybe the first few times you drove you we’re checking your mirrors all the time, and making sure nothing was going on around the car. Now you just get in and you just do it. You’re probably skipping a bunch of steps you thought you needed to do in the beginning. Over time, maybe you start to skip other steps. Some drivers don’t turn on their blinkers when they’re changing lanes. They’re like, “People will figure it out around me.” They just don’t do these things, so they’re not following the process. They’re breaking the law.

You have these things that you want to be followed because it keeps the business safe, it protects you from liability in the business, whatever. Your team members, they’re going to gravitate towards skipping steps. They’re going to gravitate towards what’s easiest. If there aren’t checks and balances, and accountability in place, what happens over time is everything’s kind of gravitating towards some sort of ease, and some sort of chaos, and you’re not really aware of it. Then somebody quits because usually when you look at what they were doing, you’re like, “Oh my gosh.” It’s usually the person that the entrepreneur thinks is the most critical and essential in the business.

Every time I’ve had that person on my team that I thought, “If they left, my whole world would fall apart. My business would crumble. It’d be the worst thing ever.” That was always the best person for me to lose. Why? Because what was happening was the reason you feel like they’re so critical is because you have so much uncertainty around what they do. You feel like they’re the only one that knows how to do it, and it’s their job security they love to maintain. But really, if it can be done by them, it can probably be done by just about anybody that has maybe the right demeanor, and the right personality type for that position, but you need to have those processes documented so they can step in. That’s how I gauge it.

Jon: I’ll chime in with as far as efficiency goes, you can keep all the same people, but there’s so much mental anguish that happens when something isn’t well-defined. Even at DoorGrow, and in many of the businesses that I’ve worked in, when you go and ask someone what they do in their day-to-day, they feel like that’s a subjective question because they feel like they’re doing something different, or at least slightly different in every single moment, in every single day. There’s so much time and energy that gets wasted when you’re constantly having to reanalyze the entire problem, and then make a decision on what the action should be.

When you actually start to document what each person is doing on a regular basis throughout the day, and you look at that from a macro perspective, even within that subjective lens of maybe some things are approached in a different way depending on the scenario, there are very clear processes, tasks, and activities that are being done on a regular basis. If those can be defined, and then clear expectations, and processes can be attached to each of those bullet points, it allows each of your employees to have a better reference point for how to handle certain engagements in the business.

One of the things that creates turnover in a business—in my experience—is that when that level of certainty on what somebody should be doing to be successful in their role is not there, resentment starts to build towards whoever the entrepreneur, or visionary, or guiding light in the business is. That resentment ultimately gets to a boiling point where it’s no longer sustainable, and then that results in somebody quitting, or throwing a fit, or making a mistake, or having an accident.

Documenting these processes is one of the best things that you can do to create a level of certainty in each of your employees’ minds so that they can be more successful and more satisfied in their position, which means that retention-wise, you’re going to keep your staff longer.

Jason: Let’s talk about some systems that are required so that your expansion into another market or in general is not premature. Because if it is premature, your operational costs are going to go up significantly. I’ll give you an example. I talked to a property management company, and they had 2000 doors. They’re on the East Coast, they had over 20 offices, but only about 2000 doors. It was split among 20 different offices. What their strategy for growth was going and buying up all these little mom-and-pop shops. They would keep those shops intact, they would keep the staff and everything. Their operational costs were ridiculous.

Then there’s another client. He had 2000 doors, and he had three locations: two in Utah, one in Idaho. Eventually, became part of the HomeRiver Group. His operational costs were far lower. Same amount of doors, his market was probably even a lower rent market, but he was probably making more money because operationally among those doors, he didn’t have 20 offices, 20 buildings to pay the lease, or whatever taxes on, or whatever. All the support staff that goes with each of these offices, all this duplicated stuff.

Here’s what I think is essential to take a look at if you’re thinking, “Hey, I want to expand into another location.” First thing you ask yourself, would I do it even if I were able to continue to grow here? If I were able to continue to have the doors in this area—where I want it—would I do it? The thing to keep in mind is, according to the Iceberg Report (the last I saw), it was 30% of rental properties are professionally managed, there’s 70% in single-family residential at least, there’s 70% available potential market share to be created. A lot of people think, “Well, it’s impossible to do that,” but if you look at Australia, you’ve got 80% of single-family residential almost professionally managed. They, at some point, we’re probably around where we are, and they’ve gotten it to 80%. We have so much opportunity there, there’s so much blue ocean. Everybody’s fighting in the bloody red water. We’ve talked about them on the show before.

The idea that we’ve run out of options is not always true. It is true if you’re playing the game everyone else is playing: SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-lead service. If you’re doing those things, it’s super competitive because that’s what everybody’s doing. That is focused on that small existing amount of market share. The people that are already looking for you rather than reaching out and creating new market share, which is what we help our clients focus on. That’s one thing to take a look at.

The systems that need to be in place. Here are some of the systems that we have in our own business at DoorGrow. One, you need a planning system. Most businesses don’t have a plan, they have no planning system. That means you have annual targets, and you have quarterly goals as a company, things to implement, monthly goals. You’re not just coming back from every property management conference with a list and chucking a grenade into the middle of the room after pulling the pin and saying, “Hey guys, I’m excited about this. We’re going to do all these things.” Everybody goes, “How? We’re already maxed out.”

You don’t have a system for growth because you don’t have a system of planning in the business. If you don’t have a planning system, if you can’t tell me a realistic annual goal that you’re going to hit, if you’ve been operating in so you think you have a system, and if you’ve not hit your annual goal for the last year, or two, or three you have a b******* system. It’s not real, you’re not hitting your targets.

Jon: I want to pause you there and unpack that statement that you made about coming back from the conference with all of these great ideas, and then chunking the grenade in the room, because I do think that happens in every industry but especially property management. Because one, there are so many conferences, and two, it’s really easy to get excited about an idea, and then just chunk it on to your staff and say, “Implement this.” When you’re talking about a planning system, the way that we do it here in DoorGrow—that I think is really effective—is you’re talking about how do we reverse engineer everything on that list and put it in yearly, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments so that we know all of the steps that are required to achieve each bullet point on that vision list that came from the conference.

Jason: If we take it even a step back further—and you’re new to the team so you’ve gotten to see this happen—you’ll remember, we go through and we take a look at the business as a whole. Every business has five core functions in the business—something I learned from one of my business coaches, Al Sharpen. This is basically the whole pipeline of the business. The goal of the business is to make money, that’s how it is successful. Then it also needs some sort of purpose besides just making money.

Those things drive everything that we do. We take a look at these five core functions, and we look at each of them, and we figure out where are we deficient, where can we be stronger? It’s impossible to be solid on all of them. That’s impossible because for example, if you ramp up sales, then your fulfillment side’s going to hit constraints. You’re going to have difficulties as a team. If you’re closing a bunch of doors your team’s going to have difficulty onboarding all these new clients, for example, so that’s going to go down.

Everything’s always in flux. The thing to work on is the thing that’s weakest. Generally, that’s earliest in the sales pipeline. We take a look at that, and we figure out, “All right, what are the things, and what could we do? Then we decide what we will do as a team? Then we figure out what is possible for us to do over the next quarter.” These will all go back to our annual goal, which we have a couple of annual goals, and it’s all broken down. We reverse-engineer it from what the business actually needs. If our goal is to focus on lead gen—if we’re a property management company—we’re not going to go and implement a maintenance coordination software that quarter if that’s already going really well. That maybe we’d do that next quarter.

The problem is, businesses don’t have a planning system, they don’t know how to break this down, and business owners come back. If they do come up with goals they go to some Tony Robbins event, and they’re adding extra zeros to the end of everything, and they’re getting super pumped up, and that demoralizes your team because your team, all they hear is, “This is impossible,” and they’re losing. There’s no way you’re going to hit these goals because they’re pie in the sky dreams.

We get excited about them as entrepreneurs, but that’s not the same for our team. Our team wants to see that we’re hitting our numbers every month, not that we, “Oh, well, we missed it this month.” That idea in setting goals that a lot of people will throw out there, which I don’t believe is true, is that it’s better as a team to aim for the stars than a pile of manure and hit. It’s better as a team to aim for the pile of manure and have success. Your team can feel what it’s like to win and have momentum.

Jon: I just want to make sure that we’re making this actionable for people, and give people a clear way to assess whether they’re prematurely expanding, or whether expansion maybe is the right step.

Jason: It’s a real simple question, do you have a planning system? Can you say with certainty that you have an annual goal that you are confident that your team is going to hit financially? Do you have a quarterly goal that you know what you’re doing this quarter, and that you feel pretty confident that you’re going to get these quarterly targets implemented? Do you feel confident that your team can hit the 30-day goals that are going to help create those quarterly targets? Does your team know what they’re doing every single week relevant to those 30-day goals? If the answer isn’t yes to all of that, then you’re just operating with the shotgun approach, and your team feels confused, they’re concerned, they don’t know where the company is going, so they can’t really help you get there.

Everybody at DoorGrow is aligned towards what’s going in my goal of revenue, making a difference in the industry, all these things are very clear. We talk about them during every meeting: our whole planning system, what we’re doing, even what we’re doing on a weekly basis that we meet as a team like we did yesterday. To go over our weekly commitments we checked in, what did you do towards these commitments that you had for last week? Did you get these done? There’s this high-level of accountability. That’s a planning system. That’s one system the business needs.

Jon: So far, to analyze whether it’s too premature to expand, we’ve got: if you as the entrepreneur walked away from the business, would the business still continue to operate with success? Then we have if you could add the number of doors that you want to add in your existing marketplace without having to go to another locale would you prefer to just add them in your existing marketplace, or is there some other reason for you to want to be in another city. Then do you have a clear planning system where you’ve got annual, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments that are all being reverse-engineered so your staff can be successful? Really, that’s part of operating without you being directly involved in the operations. What else?

Jason: The other thing that’s essential in the business before you can expand is—we’ve mentioned this already—you need process documentation. You need a system in the business for finding, and storing, and updating documentation. You need a process system or documentation system in the business that includes job descriptions, org charts. There needs to be clarity as to who’s supposed to be doing what and how to do things. That’s absolutely critical in a business especially if it’s going to scale because once you have a team, there’s turnover, there’s hiring. These things can derail a business if they’re critical roles if you don’t have these things in place. Process documentation system is really important.

The software we use is Process Street. Everyone can check out the episode that I did with the founder and CEO of Process Street. We use that as an internal documentation system, and then we also have job descriptions, org charts, these kinds of things. We’re going through a process because we’ve got a jumble routine. When you add a new team member it screws everything up, Jon. Now, my role changes. My job description is different. You’re stealing things from me, which I love. Everybody else’s job changes a bit too. We’re making all these adjustments.

Ashley—my ex-wife—she works for me now, and works in the business, and she’s great. She’s over some of our operational pieces, you’re taking on sales and marketing. These are all things that I used to do, they were my role. Like I said, I used to do every single thing in the business, every single thing. Now we have at least 10 people on the team, and they’re all doing something that I used to do. Pretty much all of them are better at it than me. Everyone’s better at these things than I am.

Jon: I just want to speak from the perspective of an employee because anytime I’ve gone into a new business, if it’s chaotic, and nobody knows what they’re doing, and nobody has clearly defined roles, it is so uncomfortable for a new person to step into that environment. That’s why there’s a lot of 90-day churn and turnover for new hires because when somebody says, “Yeah, I don’t feel like it’s a good fit.” What they mean is, “You didn’t provide me with the level of certainty that I was looking for in this role.” When everything is clearly defined and documented the way that you’ve done at DoorGrow, it allows me as a new hire to come in with so much certainty, and I feel like everything is teed up for me to be successful in my position which makes me want to do more in the position.

Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com.

Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge in getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com.

Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Enjoyed this episode on premature expansion in property management? Get equipped with more content like it by exploring past episodes of the #DoorGrowShow.

Jason Hull

Jason's mission is "to inspire others to love true principles." This means he enjoys digging up gold nuggets of wisdom & sharing them with property managers to help them improve their business. He founded OpenPotion, DoorGrow, & GatherKudos.

4 Ways We Can Help You Get More Clients, More Freedom & More Money

1. Get the 95-minute DoorGrow CODE™ Training

In how to grow your PM business and then make it scaleable. In 95 minutes, I'll show you why most marketing is wasting your money, how to eliminate your advertising expense entirely, and grow faster than your competitors.

Just reply with the word "CODE" in the subject line & we will send it to you.

2. Join our In-Person, 2-Day, Gamechanger Workshop & Take Big Action
This event is designed to be different than conferences in that we are bringing in expert coaches and you will be taking immediate action to review financials, improve profits, assess your team, systematize realtor referrals, find and initiate your first acquisition deal, and more. This will catapult your business toward success
3. Join our next DoorGrow Boardroom

4x a year, we run a 2-day intensive in Austin, TX, with a small group of savvy PM business owners. We deep dive into each business. You will gain insights into your business, get clarity, and walk away with a solid strategic plan.

The next dates are November 8-9. Learn more here.

4. Get a Scale Roadmap Session
If you ever want to get some 1:1 help, we can jump on the phone for a quick call, and brainstorm how to get you more leads, increase profits, and make the business easier, less stressful, & more efficient. Book a call with us.