DGS 27: Inspect & Cloud: Inspection Software For Property Managers

Today, I am speaking with John Ray, of Inspect & Cloud, a digital property inspection software product. If you haven’t heard of this software, I think you will love it. It is just really cool, and John is also a really cool guy. John began in real estate when he was 18 years old. He soon discovered that selling houses was harder than he thought, but he was good with technology. He started developing websites for realtors and working on marketing and lead generation.

While working on the tech side of real estate, John was offered an opportunity to teach at Google. He ended up traveling with a group of brand ambassadors and teaching SEO, lead generation, and email marketing. John wanted to implement some of the things he was teaching and he was also fascinated by SaaS product. After talking to many realtors, he realized that there was a pain point when it came to managing paper property inspections. Here is John’s story of the creation of Inspect & Cloud.

You’ll Learn…

[04:47] How managing paper property inspections was an issue which created an opportunity for searchable cloud based reports.
[05:44] In three and half years they have grown from zero users to over a thousand.
[06:22] Inspect & Cloud digitizes inspection reports.
[07:51] How Inspect & Cloud makes it really easy to compile and organize property information in a few minutes.
[09:53] Saving time using software as opposed to hiring more people. Scalable businesses use technology.
[11:34] How Inspect & Cloud offers the most features and most streamlined inspection report organization.
[14:10] How using one software that does everything doesn’t give you the features and efficiency of specialized software that does the best job.
[18:30] The goal of managing systems and processes and let those manage the team.
[20:55] How Gamification and accountability are incorporated into the software.
[24:21] Leveraging software and communication the right way.
[28:56] Challenges with property managers not communicating the actions they are taking.
[37:37] How it’s backward thinking to skimp on software that touches with the property owners.
[40:00] Perceived value is everything. Your competitive advantage allows you to collect prospects.

Tweetables

Resources

Inspect & Cloud

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Transcript

Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, 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.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision.

I’m your host, Property Management Growth Hacker, Jason Hull, the Founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course, DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

This is episode number 27 of the DoorGrowShow. In today’s episode, I’m going to be speaking with John Ray of Inspect & Cloud. Inspect & Cloud, a really cool software, I didn’t know anything about it before this interview. After this interview, I think all of you are gonna wanna know something about it. Since doing this interview, I’ve hung out with John here and there on the phone. He is just such a really cool guy, just such a different guy. I just really appreciate him professionally and as a friend. I think you’re really gonna enjoy this, let’s get into the show.

This is Jason Hull with the DoorGrow Show. I’m hanging out here with John Ray of Inspect & Cloud. John, how are you doing today?

John: I’m doing well. Thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason: Glad to have you. John, tell everybody a little bit about you so they’ll understand your background, your background is interesting and the bio that you sent me over. Share a little bit of your story. That can lead us right into Inspect & Cloud and how that came to be.

John: When I was 18, I got a real estate license. I thought I was gonna be the next big Texas real estate tycoon and have my 10-gallon hat and be walking around, kicking fences at all my ranch land. It turned out that at 18 it was harder to sell houses than I thought. I was really good at the tech side of things, the internet was becoming a thing in small businesses. I found myself developing websites for realtors and for property managers and thriving more in the marketing side of real estate.

I jumped around from RE/MAX to real property services to the equity residential and did everything from property management to selling investment properties and lead generation for that. That put me in the space of just working with small business and helping them understand the online landscape. An opportunity opened up for me to go and teach at a bigger level Google.

I went and worked for Google and had a team of about 100 brand investors and we travelled all over the country throwing these big events where we would teach entrepreneurs, sometimes 3000 of them in the audience from all over each state. Everything from this is what email is to this is advanced Search Engine Optimization and how you can utilize it to generate leads in your business.

After we had gone to all 50 states, you can only teach entrepreneurship so long before you wanna get back into it. I was really fascinated with this idea of backpack entrepreneurship, this idea that you could build something and really be of service to a niche community but run it all from a computer and a backpack anywhere in the world. I started looking into SaaS software as a solution, I’ve talked to some of my old property management friends, I put them through a quiz of like, “What are the most frustrating things happening in your business?”

Seems like time and time again, people were landing on this idea of, “We don’t know what to do with all these property inspections. We’re doing it by pen and paper, they’ve all got coffee stains. When we have to go to court, we can’t find them because they’re in a stored unit somewhere.”

It seemed like there is an opportunity, three and a half, four years ago when we started in the marketplace to digitize all these, put these reports in the Cloud, make them searchable and allow property managers to better present what they were doing at each property and build a competitive advantage for them because property owners really do like these reports that get generate in these PDFs. I merged my early real estate career with the tech Silicon Valley experience that I had and Inspect & Cloud was born unto that.

Over the past three and a half years, we’ve grown from zero users to over a thousand. I’ve seen property managers use this from everything, from saving time and money, spending less time out of each property, being able to offer additional reports to their property owners to prove value and putting it in their prospecting kits to showcase that they’re going to be handling the property in a way that warrants you hiring them as a property manager.

Jason: Inspect & Cloud, for those that have never heard of it, basically is a service, a software platform that allows them to easily do inspection reports.

John: We digitized the property inspection reports. Most property managers, at a minimum, are doing an inspection report when a tenant moves in and when someone moves out. Rather than doing that by pen and paper which unfortunately a lot of the industries are still using or some kind of an antiquated Excel spreadsheet system, we allow you to create an itemized checklist of room areas and room items that you wanna make sure are inspected in every single property.

You develop that template in our desktop solution, our web based solution and then you can use our Android or iPhone app to go out to the property, collect all of the information, take photos, type out comments, use audio comments, take video, and then we compile all of that information into a PDF report that can then be emailed to your maintenance staff, to a property owner or to anyone else who needs that information. It can all get stored in the cloud so that if you ever have to reference that whether it’s in a court hearing or just to reconcile your books, you’ll have those from any computer in the world.

Jason: Property managers that are using Inspect & Cloud, what were they doing before?

John: A lot of the industry is still using some sort of a paper system melded with a Microsoft Word template that they use or a Microsoft Excel template. A lot of people are still taking photos on a digital camera then they try to find the cord, plug that into the computer, import all of those. They’re sending hundreds of photos to a property owner as an email attachment in no real other.

What we’ve done has basically made it really easy to collect whatever information you need about a property, to split that up into room areas and various itemized categories, add your comments, attach photos with the timestamp and organize all of that information automatically so that you’re not having to pay a receptionist or somebody doing data entry at $12 an hour, some property managers were spending up to three or four hours compiling each report. We’re able to deliver that same information in a much easier to read format in a matter of minutes.

Jason: They’re collapsing three to four hours down to minutes?

John: It depends on the property and how detailed the report is. On average in the old system when we’d go out with the stopwatch, we had people that were spending up to two hours at the physical property and then when they got back to the office, sometimes up to four hours compiling the report. You’re talking about taking six hours of potential time that goes into creating these reports to send to a property owner and boiling that down to easily less than half an hour.

Jason: If you can save time on anything, you should just do it because software, first of all, is cheaper than people. The first thing I hear out of every property manager’s mouth when they start actually growing and they’re scaling is, “I need to hire more people.” Rather than, “Maybe we should make our systems and processes actually scalable rather than throwing a human being at the pile every time there’s some level of growth. They need to build a business that’s scalable and they need to have technology and things in place to make that possible from day one.

The people that need this most are the people that are just starting out, that have nothing like this, they have no systems, no processes, and they’re doing everything themselves, they’re gonna get trapped at about 50, 60 doors doing everything themselves. They won’t be able to hire that person at $12 or $15 an hour. They can’t get them on because they can’t afford to bring on somebody full time, they can’t afford to bring anybody on. They’re doing everything themselves and then they end up trapped. To avoid that trap, I always recommend technology.

You talked about the people that are doing everything manually in doing things old school. If anyone listening is doing that, that dinosaur level of property management, you are going to be eaten alive by my clients. That’s just going to happen, they’re going to destroy you. Please, don’t do that or become a client. What would you say to those that have AppFolio or some of these big property management software? I imagine most of these have some inspection thing in place, you find that people still use Inspect & Cloud. What’s different? Maybe you could touch on that.

John: It’s a good question because a lot of the rental programs have tagged on as an afterthought, some inspection solution. We actually get a lot of people that have gone out and run the gamut of trying all the different things out there. They either weren’t getting the customer service that they want or they didn’t have the functionality that they want or the app was crashing on them on a regular basis. The pie in the property management industry is totally big enough for us all to exist and thrive.

Competition, I think, breathes innovation. That’s certainly where a lot of our functionality and features have come. When you have some of these really big companies that are trying to do everything, they end up not really doing anything very well. We’re a small scrappy startup, we only have 12 employees. The way that I like to describe it is like some of these big companies when they design something, it’s like turning a cruise ship. Because we’re small, we’re in the industry, we’re talking to people and our only focus is Inspect & Cloud, we’re able to pivot very quickly like a speedboat.

A lot of our functionality over the last three years has been from myself and my associates getting on phone calls every single week talking to property managers, asking what needs to be added, what needs to be changed, where is the industry heading and making sure that we stay ahead of the curve so that we always have a solution that is going to hit 30 or 40 or more data points that are really valuable and create a perceived value for a property management business instead of AppFolio who’s just tacking on additional products so that they can make an extra $30 or $40, $70 a month off of you.

Jason: I think you make a really, really valid point. Essentially, there are these big platforms, these companies and they try to do everything. They tend to be more jack of all trades, master of one. A lot of people will go at those. The challenge that I see with those property managers is they go with it because they’re like, “Everything is there.” And they just do that. I tried that business model in my own business. I’m like, “Internally, let’s just use one software that does everything.”

We found that if we use a software that did project management, customer relationship management like a sales CRM that had internal communications, have billing, has support, these were the worst software ever. Every single piece was worst. The challenge with that is we operated far less efficiently. It was cheaper. We had this Frankenstein that was cheaper then I was like, “This is not working, I want the best.” If I can find the best software even if it’s 10 times the price in combination of everything else, it’s saving me massively on time savings.

John: You made a good point in that. The millennials are starting property management companies all over the place and they’re instantly implementing all of the software. A lot of what I’m doing with property managers is helping bridge the generational gap. I know this is how property managers used to do things, here’s how the millennials are doing it. They’re the ones going after all of your property owners right now.

You want the best, you wanna be able to showcase that as a property manager, you’re utilizing the best tools out there. You wanna work with software companies that not only know how to develop a software but also understand you as a property manager. I think that’s what makes smaller operations like yours, Jason, and mine so successful. I know your brother was in the property management industry. I clearly was working in my 20s through the property management industry.

I think that you and I are just both really curious people, that’s the sense that I get from you. We’re constantly wanting to pick people’s brain like what’s working for you? What’s not working for you? We’re implementing that into the systems that we’re developing. When it comes to Inspect & Cloud versus some of these bigger platforms that developed inspection tools as an afterthought so they could make an extra $40 a month, we’re really competitively priced even with them.

One of the biggest things that I hear from property managers is that they need customization. Not every single property, really no property, is gonna be exactly the same. One of the key things that we’ve built into Inspect & Cloud is the ability to customize templates for each type of property so you can have a template that’s for single family homes, one for multi family homes, one for HOA inspections, one for roadside inspections.

Once you’ve developed these checklists, you just add anyone in your office as an inspector. Anyone with an iPhone or Android can download the app. They can go out there and seamlessly, flawlessly collect all of these information whether they’ve ever done an inspection or not.

It’s a binary yes/no system. They literally are just going through the app answering yes no to a series of questions for each item and room area in the template, adding photos when it feels relevant, adding comments and video when it feels relevant and then our system takes all of that data that they’ve entered and organizes it in a way that’s really valuable for a maintenance staff or a property owner. We have a lot of people who are turning their receptionist into a part time inspector because our software makes it easy for anybody to go out there and collect the level and quality of information that is demanded by property owners.

Jason: This is the kind of stuff that gets me really excited. I would imagine people listening right now are getting a little bit excited just hearing that. Checklists, having systems and processes that anybody can follow is like the dream in business. If you’re gonna have staff, that’s what you want. The ultimate goal for any business owner should not be to build a team and then manage that team, the goal should be to manage systems and processes and let those manage the team.

John: I agree wholeheartedly. One of the other features that we’ve built into Inspect & Cloud is basically we have several levels of inspector. We have a company level, then we have a master inspector level and then we have a sub inspector level. From the company and master inspector level, you have the ability to monitor everything that your inspectors are doing. If you have five people out in the field each inspecting 20 properties, you’re gonna be able to see which properties were assigned to them, are they pending, have they been completed.

There’s a dashboard for you to see how much time did they spend at a property. A lot of times, an employee will go out and they’ll blow four hours at a property because they don’t wanna have to go back to the office and do real work. By the time they arrive at the property to the time they finish the report, we tell you how much time was spent there and then give you a leaderboard of which of your inspectors are most efficient so that you can honor and award people who are going out and getting things done in an efficient manner.

Jason: Creating transparency and accountability in a business is huge. That’s a big deal because if that, within organizations, happens all the time, I’ve had team members and employees that I felt that were stealing time, everybody dealt with this before. Creating that accountability makes everybody in the organization feel safer, it makes the organization profitable, it’s makes a better environment for everybody to live in. Does your software even do GPS tracking on these people?

John: To a certain extent, it’s not as big brother as you may thing. We have GPS maps built into the app so that people can easily find where the properties are that have been assigned to them. Also, there’s a level of gamification, that’s what we’ve found, is that it’s fun to see how quickly can I view this property? How many can I do in a row? Which of my properties are all in the same neighborhood? Can I get them of all them in one day?

There’s a reason that every single app in the world is putting badges and words on things because like to see if they can beat their best score. We’ve seen that since the arcade days even though we’re not offering all kinds of crazy badges to inspectors because it’s just not really needed. Anytime you’re collecting data on your own personal performance, there is an inherent gamification that almost makes doing this fun.

Jason: When people know what’s expected and know exactly what to do and they’re given the tool to do it, then naturally, performance will start to improve and increase. That’s interesting, just the time savings alone. When I say time, I want everybody to think time multiplied by their hourly rate or by whatever you’re paying them or by what they could’ve been doing to create additional productivity in the business instead of wasting. Time is money.

If anything that can save time would offset any software cost, people need to realize this, anything that you can hand off to another company to do or to facilitate is cheaper than people and anything that can facilitate also lowering the cost of your staff, that can be a game changer.

I’ll give everybody an example, I got on Skype with Jason Fried. Have you heard of this guy? He created Basecamp. He also wrote all these books on virtual teams and everything. This guy is pretty high level, I was stoked to be talking to him. He took a look at my business at the time and we had all these different things that were going on. I had one piece of software that I figured out, it was cutting our productivity in half across the board. Everybody in my organization was less effective because of one piece of software. I’ll call them out, the software was Slack. Everybody loves Slack but the problem was Slack gave us no context and everything was immediate and urgent, we had interruptions constantly. We thought this was better than email, everything was instant.

The most segregation that it gave us was by projects, we had different rooms. We were constantly interrupting each other, it was just a flow of diarrhea, of messages in each room. There’s no context, nothing was associated with a particular task or a particular topic in that project. Every single person on the team would have to go and look what’s been going on. He showed me Basecamp and we started using that. We started using it the right way because it also has that feature in it which is called Campfire. We started using it effectively and properly. My staffing cost, I’m not joking, overnight, cut in half.

We were doing meetings, Google Hangout meetings because I run a virtual team, we’re doing them constantly. We were more productive than our big competitors, they’re big and slow. Like you’re saying, they’re like the cruise ship trying to turn around. When we started leveraging proper communication within the organization and leveraging software effectively and understanding the right way to use it, and I trained my team how to use it properly, overnight, all these Google Hangout we were doing constantly and these breakout sessions and everything to solve problems and figuring things out and the constant eruptions all went away.

We have one team meeting a week and we’re pretty much going to talk about projects. We used to talk about projects constantly, everybody knows what’s going on, everybody is context, only the people that need to be interrupted or messaged about something are and really most interruptions are gone because we’ve guard against that as an organization. Leveraging software can have a huge impact on your business.

I don’t think people realize, if they take one situation which is inspections and all of the things that could be connected to that and then multiply it by every single inspection they do with every single employee that’s doing them, these costs and this time and everything really balloons out of control. They won’t know until they try it out.

John: There are so many studies that have been done on time management. If you’re in the real estate industry and you haven’t read this book, The One Thing, this is written by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. I had the good fortune of being able to work with Jay to develop the online course for Time Blocking Mastery. The concept of time blocking is this idea that your business can’t be, like you said, a Slack environment where you’re just constantly being barraged by interruptions, in the book they call it bunkering down.

It’s this idea that if you can create segments in your day where you know that you’re gonna be specifically focused on one thing, one, you become much more effective in your work, creativity levels are higher, stress chemicals and cortisol are lower. You just become a more effective manager and person by bunkering down and having this time. One of the interesting studies that they’ve done is showcasing how much time is wasted in five to seven minutes segments throughout the day.

Anytime an employee is walking to the break room or having to walk to the copy machine or God forbid, you’re still using a fax machine, that walk from their desk to the fax machine, they’re gonna run into one or two different people, they’re gonna have little two to three minute conversations. You’re talking about, over the course of an eight hour day, they’re wasting one, two hours just moving about through the office or doing menial tasks or being interrupted by constant email or chat messenger applications.

With Inspect & Cloud, we really wanted to systematize this so that your inspections can become bunkered time. When you go out there, you can be really effective with that time and then create a deliverable, in this case the inspection report PDF, that is going to make your property management company have more perceived value to your owners because property owners, especially when they’re out of state or out of city owners, really love to get a regular report showcasing what their property looks like.

They love to look at video, they love to look at photos because it feels like they’re walking through the property. It reinforces to them that on a regular basis, someone is going in and checking on their property. I know this for certain because I can see the images.

Jason: I think that’s huge because one of the biggest myths about property management that’s holding the industry captive, that’s preventing property managers from getting on additional business are, one, crappy property managers, there’s a lot of them out there. They’re not really doing inspections, they’re not taking the time to do this stuff. Also, it’s all of those that are not being the squeaky will, they’re not letting people know that they’re actually doing something.

Not everybody is aware of property management, that’s a challenge but it’s also an opportunity for those that are savvy. My clients here in the state, they know what I’m talking about. The challenge is with the property managers that are not letting people know that they’re doing something, they’re also contributing to this problem, they’re creating this perception that property managers just take my money. I can just do nothing and let the property go down the drain overtime. I could just collect rent, I could setup a system to do that.

They don’t want the awkward moments of going into a property, inspecting it, they don’t wanna deal with that, they don’t want the awkward moments of collecting rent and this kind of thing. This is why they hire property managers. If you can deliver a nice report, you can deliver a video, you can deliver the stuff, you’re letting them know that you’re doing something.

I worked at HP, I have this boss, I was up in Boyce and my boss was in Texas. I was on this team of two, we were two people over this system they use for the entire company. There were two administrators in all of HP, it was a system for document storage and workflow and approval process. Every PDF that went through, we had to go through an approval process and everything before it went public. I was on this team that would support the system and we had this boss. His perception of us constantly was that we were doing nothing.

I learned really quickly to change my instant message status and the stuff that he could see, I was like, “Where is he getting the perception that I’m doing nothing?” I started changing my instant message status, I started letting him know like sending him a message, “I’m doing this and I’m working on this. Today, I’m doing this.” Soon he started hopping on and saying, “Your coworker, is he working?” He thought I was the only person doing anything, the reality was we were both working constantly but it’s the perception that matters a lot of times.

Your job as a property manager isn’t to just manage a property, it’s to manage a piece of mind for your clients. If you have something and you add in a piece of the puzzle like Inspect & Cloud and it facilitates that even just a little bit more, you’re gonna increase client retention, you’re gonna increase word of mouth business because they’re gonna be like, “Look at this report, look at this stuff that they’re doing. They’re awesome, they’re great.” You’re going to increase your online reputation to get better reviews. All of that means more business and more money and getting more market share in your local market.

A lot of property managers, the reason they wouldn’t sign up for your services or they wouldn’t go and get third party software is because they’re just trying to keep software cost low. For those listening, I wanna point out this is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your business, is to try and keep the thing that can save you the most time and the most money to keep those costs low versus staffing cost. It’s probably the stupidest thing that I hear happening in the industry, “I don’t wanna add that or do this because that adds more money and I already have something that’s okay.” When they’re shuffling that cost and pushing that weight towards staff and their staffings cost are ballooning through the roof.

Do you guys integrate with some of these different software platforms?

John: That’s our most recent expansion of Inspect & Cloud. Right now we’re integrated with PROMAS, that’s the first integration that has happened this year that went live in January. We’re definitely in negotiation with a lot of other platforms to start making those type of integrations available. Because we allow you to download a standalone PDF, a lot of people just have created a system where they download the PDF from our system because it’s so easy to create and looks so good and then they upload that PDF into whatever system they’re using at that particular moment.

We give […] to move that information about and we are looking to make those integrations. The biggest value and the most common thing that we get to piggyback on what you were just saying is that there is so much value in showing your property owners that you’re actually doing something. Your story about you at HP reminded me of some advice that I was given when I started working at Google. It was like, “Always be the person to take really great notes in every meeting you go to and then email the notes out to everyone who is in the meeting.”

That served me so well because it made it look like I was the guy running all of these meetings, I was the guy who was implementing all of these ideas even though I was just really taking notes of what other people were saying but I was promoted many more times than some of my peers and colleagues that I started out with. I think a lot of it had to do that I became so good at showcasing that I was doing work.

For property managers, that’s huge because retention is everything. If you cannot consistently keep the prospects that you’re bringing into your business, it’s like having a ship that’s sinking and you’re constantly having to plug the leaks. Inspect & Cloud is such a good way to build a perceived value to showcase that you’re going above and beyond what your competitors are offering and to put people’s nervous systems at ease.

If people spend money based on what their nervous system is telling them to do and if they’re getting a regular report from you, there’s a sigh of relief that happens with that and then they’re okay to continue writing the check or cutting you your commission.

Jason: I love it. That is such a great hack, the taking notes. I’ve seen people do this in businesses. Some people created a whole a whole business going to certain conferences and taking notes, then they turn around and and sell their notes. Even to the people that put the conference on are buying these notes and using these notes because they want to have this resource summary. It’s a great hack for getting ahead in business, guys.

What you had mentioned about integration, I believe this is the future. Every company that is trying to lock down, build a wall around your business, prevent you from working with outside companies and vendors doesn’t have an open API which is an application interface that allows their software to communicate with other people’s software. These companies, my belief is they’re going to fail or they’re going to have a very difficult time. Free property management software and some of these things are probably coming down the pipe.

All of these companies are going to be doing API integrations with each other, they’re all going to be communicating. Somebody will be able to pick and choose, they’ll have their property management software, they can then pick their maintenance coordination software, they can pick their inspection software, they can pick their prospective tenants and property marketing platform, they’ll be able to take all of these pieces and create their ultimate system that all works well and speaks well together. They’ll be able to pick and choose the best and build the business based on what’s the best out there. If they want to change out one piece, they’ll be able to do that.

John: One of the interesting things is that the property managers that I speak with, the first thing that they wanna do is get a really good accounting software, a really good rent roll software. That makes total sense. You have to have the bones of your business setup. There’s a hesitancy to spend money on software when something is going out to the property manager or going out to the property owner. They’re skimping on the software that the property owner actually has a touch point with.

It’s just backwards thinking because you want to put your best foot forward anytime the property owner is peering into your business. These reports are such a valid and valuable way to showcase that your company has got it together and they’re on the ball.

Jason: I think putting out that image, that’s branding, that’s perception. You wanna maintain this high perception at all times that you’re high value. What will be really cool for my clients that use our GatherKudos service, tying those two together, put your GatherKudos link on the bottom of these reports that anybody that goes that you’re giving these reports to you gives you an opportunity to give your business a feedback because this is another touch point you have with your customer.

John: I love that, we need to do that for sure.

Jason: Inspect & Cloud, how can people check this out? I think you even put together a little present for people that are gonna be listening to DoorGrow Show and watching this.

John: What I tell people is you’re gonna immediately see the value once you do a test inspection. For anybody listening to this podcast, if they go to inspectadcloud.com/doorgrow, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed. That no credit card offer is just for listeners of this podcast. We have some general reports that you can use without even having to build out a customer report, just to get a feel for how things work.

I’m just encouraging people to go and do an inspection of your office or of your bedroom or something just to understand how simple it is to collect the information and then have it packaged in this really beautiful report.

Jason: I love this idea, I love your insights. Obviously, this guy is a savvy guy. He’s making sure that this thing is intuitive and works really well. John, I’m really excited to have you on the show. I appreciate you coming out. Every go and check out inspectandcloud.com/doorgrow and try out their software. Any parting words for people listening to the DoorGrow Show?

John: What I always tell property managers is that perceived value is everything. What your competitive advantage looks like is what allows you to collect prospects over someone else because they’re talking to multiple people, they’re comparing you with the guy down the street or the gal down the street. The more tools and assets that you can put into your prospecting kits to showcase why you’re better than everybody else in town, that perceived value is everything and it’s what builds long term customers.

In software, we have a term called churn rate which is basically the amount of time that somebody sticks with a software before they cancel the software. You want your churn rate to be as long as possible, the same thing goes with property management. You want to keep people in your property management firm as much as possible so that you don’t have this leaky ship. You do that by constantly going above and beyond what you promised. The Inspect & Cloud inspection reporting system is a really great way to, on a regular basis, showcase that value above and beyond what you promised your property owners.

Jason: Fantastic. John, thanks for coming out and hanging out with us on DoorGrow Show.

John: Thanks for having me, Jason.