DGS 29: The Real Issue is Deeper Than Your Property Management Pricing

Property managers want to get business and make money, but they often make the mistake of underpricing their services. In the long and short run, it would be much better to make more revenue with less clients. The challenge is finding a way to reach an audience that will pay for a quality service and allow you to actually make money.

Today, I am speaking about price sensitivity to the franchisees at Keyrenters. I had done some past consulting work with them and they invited me to speak to their regular audience. I talk about how marketing to different channels and having a solid reputation while being able to sell to the right audience can make all of the difference with pricing options.

You’ll Learn…

[03:42] Shoring up branding and creating reputation profiles as a business.
[04:53] Category expansion is building brands and creating market share by finding an audience.
[10:33] Focusing on the blue water where everyone else isn’t.[13:24] Reviews are one channel for warm leads, but you can multiple review channels.
[14:11] Sales is the number one thing to know.
[15:42] How to deal with pricing and people asking for discounts.
[16:34] Discount type companies have a higher churn rate and lower retention rate.
[17:11] Reaching out and touching people and letting them know you are a better option.
[17:47] Taking on too many doors at low price points will make you overextend yourself and not be able to hire help. It’s better to have a profile of half the size and make more revenue.
[18:54] Keeping costs low while getting a fee that makes sense.
[19:19] Decide what you want and what you can part with.
[23:02] Learning how to sell through failure or getting coaching.
[23:59] Investing in yourself is the best investment. Mindset shifts for valuing yourself.
[30:55] Knowing and understanding your business leads to success and more of the same.
[32:28] Multipliers of increasing your sales by a small percentage.
[37:46] Understanding why you are in the business and why you do and how you do it. The art and science of figuring out your why.
[42:32] The number one thing you can do to improve is invest in yourself every day.
[46:40] Taking action on the four main areas of your life.

Tweetables

Resources

Keyrenter Franchise

Cold Leads Calculator

Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter

Cold Calling FRBOs for Property Managers With Daniel Madison

National Association of Realtors Broker Summit

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 29. In today’s episode, I am meeting with the franchisees of Keyrenters. Keyrenter, the team over there reached out to me, I had done some work for them in the past consulting, website stuff, stuff like that. They had seen a video or something that I’d posted about price sensitivity so they invited me to speak to all their franchisees on one of their regular calls to talk with them about price sensitivity and this challenge that people have in sales. It took an interesting turn, it really is a symptom of a larger problem and you’ll kind of hear that come out through this call so you get to listen in on a phone call that I had with them and I’m doing most of the talking and I hope you enjoy it.

Interviewee: Jason is an experienced internet marketer and growth hacker that is working in technology industry over the last decade or so. He’s the Founder of OpenPotion, DoorGrow, GatherKudos, and ThunderLocal, couple of those I haven’t heard of, like to ask to elaborate on those.

He’s worked with and consulted hundreds of property managers consistently. He’s constantly is in investing in himself, has worked with some of the top business, some marketing coaches around his personal wise statement or mission statement is to inspire others to love true principles which means he loves to figure out what actually works and share that with others.

He has a no BS real and raw focus on helping build the property management industry, believe the industry needs category expansion and not competition. His goal is to increase the market share rather than having property managers continue to fight over existing market share. Couple quick questions, Jason, what’s ThunderLocal and what do you mean here by category expansion?

Jason: One of the processes we take property managers through is to shore up the blind spots and leaks in their business. We’ll take them through branding but you guys had already the dial-in  and then we will take them through reputation. But the problem was we were changing most of other business names and so we saw this gap because if they’re changing business names or they’ve moved offices or they just need to get their business name out there and they need all this reputation profile setup so that we can drive traffic through their online reviews. We needed a service to fill that gap because people were basically asking for it to do all the citation cleanup to setup, get them out to the four major aggregators that pushed business listings out to all the different directories and then do the manual citation setup for the main review sites like Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Zillow, Trulia, Citysearch, Facebook, etc. so that they can start driving warm leads instead of dealing with cold ones.

Interviewee: Excellent, that’s kind of what we do for our franchisees it sounds like so excellent. Before you start, what’s the category expansion? Elaborate on that, I’m interested on what your thought is there. I had a topic for you to expand on, is that correct?

Jason: Yeah. Let’s talk about the category expansion. I think this is really important because most property managers are all fighting over the same business. The reality is the people that are searching for you on Google are the worst. They’re like the worst. Almost all marketing is focused on search engine marketing lately. But those are the people that are at the very end of the sales cycle. Everybody good has already been snatched up at that point. If anybody knows anyone that does property management, word of mouth, or referrals, that’s all been snatched up. What’s left over at the very end of the sales cycle are these really price sensitive, worst property management leads and deals that view you as a commodity.

The idea in branding is that brands are not built from the ground up through marketing, that’s a myth. I have a degree in marketing and the myth that people believe is that if im starting a business or I’m a new franchisee in the new market, I need to build my brand by doing a bunch of marketing. The reality is marketing in general, most big companies are very aware of this, marketing helps maintain market share, it doesn’t give you more market share. Building market share usually is done through other methods like PR.

For example, most people have iPhones in their pockets and it’s one of the leading smartphones not because Apple did a whole bunch of marketing, it’s because everybody was talking about it. The challenge with property management right now is we have a category-awareness problem as an industry whole. In Australia 77% maybe, maybe almost 80% of rental properties are professionally managed. Property manager is a household word like realtor is here.

Interviewee: Wow. I would say it’s the opposite here.

Jason: Right, exactly. Here, nobody knows what a property manager is and does yet everybody is going around thumping their chest saying, “We’re the best property manager in the area. Use us.” Everybody else is saying, “What the hell is that?”

Interviewee: Yup.

Jason: The challenge is what the property management industry needs in the US is category expansion. What we need is to create more market share. Instead of going around saying we’re the best property manager, we need to go find the audience that could use property management but is not aware of it if we really want to have phenomenal growth. What that does is it helps property managers grow instead of everybody fighting over the one chair in the room or the one chair in the mansion full of chairs.

Interviewee: About 70% of the market, some people say 70%, 75% of the market out there who own properties as rentals do it themselves. You’re saying to go out to that market and market and convert those people into using professional property management services.

Jason: First, the business needs to shore up all the leaks internally so they can handle growth, they need to know how to sell, they need to know how to close. These are some of the main things that we’ll work on—coaching clients—because the only people that are usually closing in the property management industry are the people that are easy. The most property managers that hit 200-400 doors, if you ask them where they got the bulk of those doors that are in their portfolio, the majority of them were not from doing APM, pay-per-click, any of this kind of stuff, they were not from marketing. They got them through word of mouth. But if you ask them where have you spent all of your money in terms of trying to grow your business, it’s the exact opposite it’s all that stuff.

Interviewee: Yup.

Jason: Some property managers are spending thousands of dollars a month in all that stuff. I had a guy the other day, this calculator called Cold Leads Calculator, you can go to doorgrow.com/coldleads, try that. But this Cold Leads Calculator basically just helps people correctly calculate the cost of their cold lead marketing and this guy was spending $1,700 a month with Propertyware to do its SEO and other stuff. I understand you guys handle it for your franchisees.

Interviewee: Yeah, yup.

Jason: He was spending $1,700 a month on internet marketing. I asked him, “How many leads are you getting a month out of that?” Because I don’t know how good he is at closing but I was asking how many leads. He said he was getting about five leads a month.

Interviewee: Wow five leads a month for $1,700?

Jason: Yeah, yeah. I say, “How many deals are you getting on a month?” He said, “Five.” I said, “Oh, that’s great. Where are you getting those deals on from?” He said, “Word of mouth.” I said, “Okay. Out of the cold leads how many of those do you convert?” He said, “Maybe one every two months” I said, “You’re spending $3,400 per acquisition?” His jaw sort of dropped. He was like, “Yeah, right. I should probably stop doing that.” I was like, “Yeah, you should probably stop doing that.”

Anyway, going back to the original thing, category expansion and focusing on the blue water where everybody else is not means you don’t have to compete. If you’re capturing people earlier in the sales cycle and you’re creating a relationship with them and they know, trust you, and like you, they’re gonna work with you and they’re not even gonna ask you what your price is, they trust you.

Interviewee: Yup. We’ve got two locations that haven’t done any marketing for number of months, probably close to going on a year now. They are the two locations that bring on the most amount of leads. The main reason for it is because of reviews. I tell people…

Jason: Yeah. Reviews is one source of a lead channel. If you really are aggressive at ensuring and you create a sytemizable process within your business to focus on your online reviews.

Interviewee: But I always […] 5, 10 minutes a week to send out an email or send a text or whatever it is to get to those people who already know and love you and more than happy to give you review.

Jason: I think that the close rate on getting a review out of your tenants and owners could easily be 70% if you just went more personal and leverage the law of reciprocity. That’s one of the things that we’ll coach clients on is how to create a system in the business because you can have tools and you can do drip campaigns and stuff like that to get reviews but the reality is there needs to be personal leverage. The more personal you go with people, the higher the return on anything. The more personal your sales process is, the higher your close rate’s gonna be. The more depth and relationship that you implement there the more personal your approach to requesting and asking for a feedback and online reviews, the more you’re going to get.

Interviewee: This is what a relationship business property management is.

Jason: Yeah, business in general is all about relationships. Like Grant Cardone says “The differences between a contract and a contact is the ‘r’ and ‘r’ stands for relationship.” That’s the only difference. The difference between a cold lead and a warm lead is that they know you, trust you, or like you.

Word of mouth creates artificial warm leads which is fantastic because it’s systemizable. They just stay there forever. These people believe the authority of Yelp, they believe the authority of the reviewer, in built, they already somewhat trust you, know you, and like you. Whereas any sort of other channel of marketing, it’s gonna be cold leads.

Now that’s one channel, that’s it. Reviews are one channel to get warm leads but you can have multiple review channels. You can have Better Business Bureau, Citysearch, Trulia, Zillow, Facebook. The more the better. But that’s only one channel review. That’s great and that works well if you have towards coming in because you then have tenants and you have owners that you’re pushing through and that can happen much more quickly but if you’re just getting started and you’re small…

Interviewee: What do you recommend for new property management companies starting out that don’t have the vendors, don’t have the owners, and the tenants to be able to give them their reviews and go down the review channel?

Jason: Number one thing that they should know and understand is sales. If they know how to sell and close, all they have to do then is to figure out where is my audience and connect with them. That’s it. But most property managers think they know how to sell and they think they can close people but the reality is their close rate is only high with word of mouth which means they don’t notice, that’s not sales.

Word of mouth is a slam dunk. If your close rate is 90% but the bulk of the deals you’re actually getting on are word of mouth, then you have a sales problem. If your close rate falls apart instantly when you get a cold lead and you’re blaming the leads and saying these are terrible and they’re low quality which is true because they’re cold leads, then you have a sales problem. It’s not a leads problem, cold leads are cold leads. You have a closing problem. You have a problem with selling effectively.

For example, we just released a new podcast episode this morning but the previous one that we had released on Friday was with Darren Hunter, out of Australia. We’re both bouncing ideas around and scripts on how to deal with the objection related to price, mainly people asking for discounts, how do you deal with asking for discounts?

Interviewee: Which is a huge issue. I would say that I have seen it both in Denver, all over up and down California big time, as well as the big areas of Texas.

Jason: Yeah, I think the discount issue and the flat fee low dollar kind of fee companies that people are competing with like Renters Warehouse as you mentioned or the people are scared or nervous about. Those companies will exist and they’re going to succeed in growing quickly. The challenge with those companies though and the challenge with being one of those type of companies is that there’s a lot much higher churn rate, retention is lower, and they have to move a lot more to feed that beast. There’s always gonna be a place for those type of companies. No matter how successful they are, there’s always gonna be a place for property managers that are succeeding and doing well. The challenge right now is that they’re going after landlords aggressively through radio marketing and other stuff.

Interviewee: Yup.

Jason: There’s a whole host of people that are not reachable by them, that are not aware of them, and that really won’t even go with them if they had a better option that they could just reach out and touch that they knew about. The challenge is that there’s nobody reaching out and touching people.

I’ll give you an example. One of my clients, Sterling, was the typical property manager that got about 50 or 60 doors, couldn’t afford to hire anybody, because he didn’t have whole backend and back office and support system like you guys provide, and he was trapped because he can only handle managing about 50 or 60 doors. There are several pitfalls. One, he took on all of these doors too low of a price point. He was in Indianapolis and he had 50 or 60 units, and he was pulling in $2,000 a month. That’s what he was trying to live off of–$2,000 a month.

Interviewee: Oh, wow.

Jason: You do the math, that’s pretty bad. But that’s what a lot of people do starting out, they make the mistake of charging too little because they think they need to undercut their competition or they think I could charge less and still be good and make money. But why would you wanna do that? Wouldn’t it be better to have a portfolio half the size and twice profitable?

Speaker: Yup. Or four times as profitable?

Jason: Yeah. It’d probably be four times that profitable if you are making twice the revenue. Because profit margin is what matters. If you can decrease your cost even slightly and increase your revenue even slightly and move those arrows in opposition to each other, you can double your profit margin–sometimes overnight in a business very easily and so it’s all about keeping the cost low well and making sure you’re getting a fee that makes sense.

At the very core, I think the most important thing for a property managers is to decide what they want–what do you really want for your business? What do you want? What are you unwilling to bend on? How much money do I want per door? How much am I willing to manage property for that makes sense? What makes me feel comfortable versus what can I get buy with versus what do I feel like I’m giving with a farm? Most either give away the farm because they feel desperate or they price themselves at a point where they feel like they are right there in the middle where they’re not comfortable.

Interviewee: Do you think at the very beginning, especially a new property management company getting into the industry and so forth that the self-confidence is just not there that’s one of the reasons why they price themselves so low?

Jason: Absolutely, absolutely.

Interviewee: But it’s actually doing a disservice.

Jason: Anybody starting out something new sucks. That’s just the role in nature and in life–we all start at level suck. Some people avoid the suck though. They don’t choose into it For example you’ve mentioned this call, your franchisees’ doing some cold-calling and giving them scripts. Lots of people will avoid doing cold-calling because it’s uncomfortable and they don’t wanna suck. But I’ll tell you what’s even more uncomfortable is going home at the end of the day to your spouse and them asking where’s the money.

Interviewee: Yup.

Jason: It’s far more uncomfortable than somebody maybe hanging up on you which really doesn’t happen too often. At worse thing they’re gonna say no, they’re not interested.

Interviewee: Oh, I was just gonna say, how many people do you know out there, Jason, that actually do cold-calls in the property management industry? Do you know of any?

Jason: There’s two different […] that you can turn on in your business. Once you shore up all the leaks in the pipeline, you know how to sell and close, you’ve gotten your mindset issues out of the way, and you believe in yourself, you believe in what you can do, you believe you’re worth it, and you know how to deal with objections, you know how to sell. Then, it could make sense to turn the […] on but the […] most turn on is marketing. The other […] though, that’s more effective that allows you to create authority, that allows you to create more warm leads instead of cold ones is prospecting. The absolute worst prospecting method are the ones that focus on the cold list. Cold-calling is probably one of the worst. But cold-calling is probably the best teacher.

Interviewee: Oh, yeah. I totally agree with you there.

Jason: I have a whole podcast episode with Daniel Madison on cold-calling that you guys should check out. We even go over script ideas and stuff like this on how to target for rent by owners. But cold-calling is one of the best ways to sharpen your sales teeth is to sell. If you’re only talking word of mouth or warm leads or you’re only really working with people that don’t have objections and you’re not really figuring stuff out.

Now, I’ll tell you this, I spent a long time, like a long time failing at sales. I just wasn’t like a natural salesperson. But now I’m a bad asset sales and I coach other people on how to do sales. But I had to fight for it. I had to fail and fail and fail–there’s no teacher like failure. But certainly there’s probably faster ways to learn. Getting some coaching, getting some one-on-one with a personal business coach is something that I believe strongly in. I have two business coaches currently. I have a profit first coach on my financial side, right now I have a Facebook coach that’s helping with some stuff and I’m looking on bringing on some other ones for some various things. I’ve had health and fitness coaches that I worked with, etc.

I absolutely believe that when you start investing in yourself personally, the dividends are far higher than if you’re investing in the business financially. What’s funny is a lot of property managers and small business owners go around and they are spending money or investing in marketing maybe, but they don’t spend anything on investing in themselves. I think there’s a huge mindset shift that happens–that when you invest in yourself psychologically, your whole subconscious seems to rewire and you start to value yourself. When you value yourself, your close rate just naturally increases.

I’ve had clients just sign up for coaching and they started closing more deals before we had even really gotten into it. I think part of it is just psychologically when we invest–and I’ve seen that in my own business. I had a coach that I didn’t even have the time to work with but the month that I was spending a bunch of money on this coach and investing in myself, I closed like $50k in business that month. It’s just this thing that if you’re not investing in yourself, you’re gonna have a real difficult time convincing other people to invest in you which is what you’re doing when you sell. We’re going out there we’re saying, “Hey, you should trust me and give your money to me.” Yet you don’t believe enough in yourself to spend money on investing in yourself.

The biggest challenge I see with business owners, coaching entrepreneurs, and working with property managers specifically, is that as entrepreneurs, we tend to try to focus on the furthest rung of the solar system away from our self if we’re the sun. That usually is like marketing. It’s distant, it’s far away, we don’t have to do it, we hand money to somebody else and hope they give us business. Then maybe we focus a little bit on a little bit deeper stuff or maybe we focus on our team and on fulfillment in our company, etc.

But the last thing that people tend to focus on is changing their self. The problem is not their marketing, it’s not their business cards, it’s not their brochures, it’s not their logo, it’s not their script, it’s really not any of those things. The real problem, the blind spot is themself, theirself–the last thing they really wanna focus on.

Interviewee: I totally agree with that. I’m a huge Tony Robbins fan. I think with Tony Robbins, it’s amazing how we sabotage ourselves with some of the simplest things, preventing us to get where we wanna go but we do it for ourselves.

Jason: We all have our own personal blind spots like physically, physically in your eyeballs, all of you right now have a blind spot in each eye–a pretty large one, it’s pretty sizeable. It’s where your ocular nerve connects to the back of your eye. There’s no light receptors there. In each eye there’s this big dark circle. On your left eye it’s on the outer left side, and on your right eye it’s on the outer right side. If something’s in that spot your brain is making up what’s there. You can’t even tell. It’s creating it. It just makes it up. In fact, you can do these visual tests where you take a whole bunch of for example black polka dots and they put one red polka dot, and if you put that red polka dot into that blind circle while you’re covering your other eye, that red circle will turn black. You’ll see all black polka dots. Because it’s your brain’s making it up, it’s trying to recreate it.

We all have blind spots and we can’t see them. That’s the challenge. The only way to see our own blind spots is to have somebody outside of us point it out which isn’t always comfortable. We need to get real feedback from other people. The ultimate feedback is reality.

Right now, if they’re not closing deals, then that’s feedback that they have a problem with closing. For example the whole issue of price is value. If somebody’s asking you questions about your pricing or they’re hung up on price, then that means you failed to display value over your competitors. They don’t see a difference, they’re viewing you all as the same. If there is no difference, they might as well go with the cheaper company. That’s a no-brainer. If all things being equal, if price is lower, they should choose the lower price company. The problem is that they don’t know how to communicate in sales, they don’t know how to effectively communicate language wise to showcase value or to shift their thinking from price towards what they should be thinking about.

I’ll give everybody one quick dirty script based on NLP that they can use. It’s real simple. This is it. Write this down, it’s just this, it’s not A, it’s B. This is what this might look like, the real issue–if they’re talking about price–then you say to them the real issue isn’t actually price, it’s b. Come up with something else. The real issue, but, “Hey, Steve, Mr. Property Manager, I understand you’re really concerned about price. The real issue though is not the price or cost of our service, the real issue is that your property’s been vacant for two months. You’ve just spent two years of our management fees with your property being vacant for two months, paying that mortgage,” for example. It’s not A, it’s B.

A is what they’re currently thinking about, B is what you want them to be thinking about. Really simple. That’s like one example. When you have an effective sales process dialed in for your business, you’re closer, it’s gonna go up. Then when you have an effective level of tools and language to use, you’re closer it’s gonna go up. It doesn’t matter who you’re talking to, you can feel fairly confident that if you want that business, it’s yours.

Interviewee: Once you know your business, it becomes second nature. I think Greg is kind of honed in on that as of late. He’s done it exceptionally well. Understanding your business is key for me.

Jason: There’s nothing more confidence building than success. If you are succeeding and you are winning, if you are getting warm leads through reviews or you’re getting warm leads through prospecting methods–Sterling for example, a client that I had mentioned, he went from struggling to having 300 doors in 6 months and he did no marketing. He didn’t do Facebook ads, pay-per-click ads, he didn’t do AdWords, he didn’t do SEO, he didn’t do any of that stuff. What he did is he started hanging out with his target audience. You start spending time with them. He spent four hours a month hanging out with real estate investors. He says that he established himself as an authority in that space and even has different organizations he’s part of and they actually advertise and promote him. He does little presentations, he spent four hours a month hanging out with investors. They can rub shoulders with them, they know him, they trust him, they like him, and he’s getting on average about 40 doors a month.

Interviewee: That’s sweet. That’s a huge increase from where he was.

Jason: His whole life’s changed. He’s making double per door what he was before. Six months later he was pulling in $2,600 in rent roll. He’s making more per door, there’s some really easy calculations you can do. Everything’s a multiply.

If you increase your close rate a small percentage, that’s a multiplier. Even if you have the same number of opportunities and leads that you have right now, you could right there double the amount of deals that you’re getting on. Just that one leak in your business. If your website has some leaks, maybe you can add a nice secure photo of yourself that adds additional trust, or you live chat, or whatever. If there’s any sort of leak there and you increase that just slightly, maybe better social proof or whatever it might be, or you add a video of yourself, or something that converts well, you dial that in, that has a percentage impact.

Here’s the genius about what Sterling does and the genius about prospecting is that he’s hanging out in the blue water. Most property managers hanging out in the red water where the sharks are all bloody and fighting over the same fish.

Interviewee: Yep, and it gets a nasty out there.

Jason: Guess how often Sterling hears people complain about price?

Interviewee: None.

Jason: No. John […], another client of mine that I coach in sales, he presented at NARPM, if anybody went to the Broker/Owner Conference. He was talking about some of these. John, he has clients that signed up with him that don’t even ask him what the price is. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, just send me your contract and let’s get going.” “Okay, cool.” You wanna know why? Because they believe John and they trust John and they like John. That’s because John doesn’t talk about what he does.

Most property managers make the marketing mistake of talking about what they do. We’re gonna manage your property, we do inspections, we do leasing–everybody does that. If you’re talking about what you do, then you’re failing because there’s something more important than what you do.

I could tell I could get on this for example, I could tell everybody what I do. But what’s more effective is for me to tell you the reason why I do what I do–I love to help business owners succeed because that’s rewarding for me. If you guys believe that, you’re gonna believe that I’m on your side, you’re gonna believe that my intention is true and then somebody might want to work with me. But my why, my purpose in life, which you said in my little bio at the beginning is to inspire others to love true principles. I love figuring out what works. I call those things principles, true principles. There are false principles and false principles are mindsets or beliefs or different nuggets of supposed wisdom that really aren’t true.

For example, marketing is the best way to grow business. I’m a marketer, most marketers won’t tell you that that’s not true. But I love figuring out what works and then sharing with other people. I would do that for free for fun. I’m doing that for free right now. It’s fun for me. I enjoy doing this. I find it rewarding. That energizes me because that’s my why.

When a business owner can really uncover their purpose, everything else false in place, all the dominos fall down, sales improves, their team improves, their fulfillment improves, everything gets easy because they now have clarity on what they do. John […], when I coached him, first we spent the whole first month dealing with his marriage and figuring out as why in this sort of stuff.

Interviewee: It had nothing to do with the property management.

Jason: Nothing to do with property management. After we got through, that he was ready to tackle the sales stuff, I gave him two videos. He was closing about four deals a month. He was doing API, he was doing everything, he’s closing about four deals a month on average. He’d been in the business for 20 years doing property management.

Interviewee: Wow.

Jason: He had about 220 doors. He had a team, his wife worked with him in the business, he did real estate deals also on the side. In 10 days of just having access to my sales videos–which are good but they were just recordings of me working with coaching clients like in a mastermind, I gave them two videos, access to these two videos, each were about two hours long. In the 10 days of him having access to those videos, he close 13 deals.

Interviewee: That ties into what you and I talked about on Friday with just honing it on who you are and I really appreciate you when I talked about that like making sure you’re good for yourself which makes you good for other people. I took a lot out of our talk on Friday just because of that simple principle itself.

Jason: The challenge is they’re going out and they’re trying and trying to create business. That’s what we do as entrepreneurs. It feels so hard and there’s so much struggle, but at the very core, they don’t even know why they’re doing it. They don’t understand why they’re doing it and they can’t go and honestly speak to somebody and say, “Here’s why I’m in this business and here’s why I do this and here are the values that we espouse in our organization and here’s how we’re gonna go about doing this.”

The what then is an afterthought. But there’s an art and a science to figuring out your why, for me, I did live group awareness trainings, I worked with coaches, I read books. It really sometimes feels like you’re trying to see the back of your head to figure that out before I got that clarity of what my purpose in life is.

Life gives us clues, everybody knows these moments in their life where they felt energized and they were loving what they were doing–that’s giving them life. It’s different for everybody. I hate writing contracts and proposals, that drains me in my life. But I have people on my team that they like writing, that’s what they love to do so they do that stuff for me. This kind of thing is something that I love and enjoy doing. It energizes me. When you understand that clarity, your productivity and your effectiveness in everything that you’re doing multiplies dramatically. But otherwise, you’re basically swimming up stream constantly. It has nothing to do with the business.

In fact, I’ll tell you this, in working with hundreds of entrepreneurs and being parts of entrepreneurial trainings, and coaching things, I can tell you without question the number one things that are affecting people’s business and the struggle that they have in their business have nothing to do with business whatsoever. In fact, the number one thing that most times—when we really get deep, when I get deep with a coaching client and we get into it and we’re figuring out what needs to happen—the number one thing usually is their marriage, or their kids.

I know this sounds weird but those are like the two things that they’re living at a state that feels either comfortable or as mediocre but if they expanded and exploded that and improve that, everything else, including their business, would explode. The other thing is your body and your health. The other thing is your purpose as we’ve been talking about or spiritual side and when all of those things are absolutely interconnected. But that’s not the stuff people wanna hear, they sign up for a business coach like John did and he was mad at me the whole first month. He didn’t like it because it was uncomfortable.

Now his wife, she came up to me at the previous Broker/Owner Conference, not this last one, and she gave me a hug, she wanted to meet me and she said, “You made my husband a better man.” How rewarding do you think that was for me? Way more rewarding than John doubling his residual income and pulling in like $40k to almost $50k a month just from the property management side alone and quadrippling his real estate side. That’s far more rewarding because John figured out his why which is very different to mine is all about relationships–totally. What’s ironic and funny is he had just gotten done with doing coaching with Tony Robbins Program and nearly was burning his marriage to the ground when he came to me because he was trying to force his wife down her throat, all the stuff that he got excited about at the Tony Robbins Events and Coaching.

Ironically, he didn’t realize how essential to his why and his purpose relationships were. When he connected with that, he changed everything. He’s now a renter and spends almost very little time in his business. Because he realized that that’s not even what really makes him feel alive or drives him. He’s more effective at it which is ironic.

Interviewee: For you, your biggest thing is just selling you and making sure that you’re right with yourself. I think you are spot on with that and I think that a lot of our […] have that faith in themselves but there’s a difference of having that faith in yourself and executing. Do you have any pointers on how to execute those tactics?

Jason: The number one is invest in yourself and you need to be investing in yourself everyday. For example, it could be reading books, it could be investing in yourself, but you maybe investing in the areas that you’re weakest in. Take a look at your body, your being, your balance, and your relationships, and your business. Which area is the most neglected? That’s probably the area–if you focus on it–would help all of the others improve.

For some people, they’re neglecting their health. They feel like they’re a little lower weight, they don’t like their health, there’s probably tapping out about two or three in the afternoon mentally, their brain’s already chemically made all the decisions that’s capable of in the day and so they’re like almost aggitative and they’re just now reacting to everything and just doing, and they’re completely unproductive and ineffective. Even the previous half of the day, they’re like probably 50% at capacity because they don’t really have that well dialled in, or it could be that they are having big stress and challenges in their relationship with their spouse or with one of their children. Those relationships emotionally have a more significant impact on a person than anything.

Interviewee: The hard part about that is it’s gonna roll over and your clients see that, the bottomline.

Jason: The challenge is if you have fires that you are dealing with in your health, in your body, in your relationship, or even in your business, if you’re putting out fires constantly or you have fires in with purpose or spirituality or whatever you wanna call that, then you are constantly in a reactive state, you’re way less effective. All of you can equate the difference between being proactive with maintenance and inspections versus reacting to maintenance.

For example, there’s a huge difference, if you’re reacting in these areas, you’re constantly in a state of crisis, you’re bouncing from crisis to crisis, you have a crisis in your health now. “I’m sick,” or, “Oh, I’ve got to go to the doctor. I’ve got this.” You’ve got a crisis maybe in your relationship. “Oh, my wife’s gonna leave me” Or, “Oh, we’re disconnected or we’re on our iPhones all night long and we don’t talk,” whatever. You’re lonely, or you’re not getting sex, that’s a big deal, especially for male entrepreneurs, it’s a huge deal, really messes with their head. Or in business, you’re going from crisis to crisis. The crisis only exists when you’re not proactively investing in these things.

My number one takeaway would be start investing in these areas. If you don’t know how to tackle these things then you need help, you need to know. The biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is they become these constant consumers of content consumption. They get caught in this constant cycle of consumption so they consume instead of reading new books and trying to learn new things and that gives them this dopamine high and they feel like they’re making progress but the reality is all they’re creating is a larger to-do list. They’re not really changing anything. Then that collapses and they feel even worse about themselves. They go watch YouTube videos, they’re trying to do the free stuff, YouTube videos, read books, this kind of thing, and they’re just keeping on more to-dos but they’re not actually moving forward in taking action. This is a big trap entrepreneurs fall into, it’s so tempting.

The biggest thing is take action but take action towards those four key areas in your life on a consistent basis so that you’re making deposits because if you become bankrupt in any of those four areas, the whole system breaks down. I realized this when I was working almost 80 hours a week, something crazy doing phone calls constantly and I literally collapsed on the floor of my home office. It was like a wake up call. My back went out, I’ve been neglecting my health that wasn’t sleeping well, that wasn’t eating well, wasn’t exercising and my eyes, I don’t know if like a disc or something happened to my back and I was like down. I was in so much pain, I couldn’t do anything. Then business is gone, spirituality forget that, that’s out the window, relationships, how effective am I as a dad or a spouse if I can’t even move? Everything went away because one area hit a crisis.

Property managers have a high divorce rate. You get into divorce mode with your spouse, or thing’s are really rocky there. Most entrepreneurs completely underestimate their relationship with their spouse. If you go to your spouse and say on a scale of 0-10, how well if you’re really honest with me would you rate us in terms of intimacy, connection, trust, everything else? On average, especially male entrepreneurs, they rate themselves at least four points higher than their spouse rates them. They’re probably afraid to ask.

My recommendation is get a coach. If you don’t feel you can do that, start investing in yourself daily deposits into all these things because at the end of your life, the business thing is gonna matter the least, everything else is gonna matter, all the other stuff is why you’re doing the business. If you don’t have clarity on that, then you’re just focusing on business, you’re one dimensional. I don’t wanna offend people but you’re basically a Delta Bravo, you’re a DB, you’re a jerk, you’re a one-dimensional jerk. Who wants to hire you? You don’t have that depth, you just focus on business to the detriment of your relationships, to the detriment of your health, to the detriments of your purpose and your spirituality and what you should be creating in your life. Not what I expected to talk about today, guys.

Interviewee: Good call.

Jason: Once you have that stuff dialled in your lighthouse rather than a toad boat. Lighthouse doesn’t have to move on price, a light house doesn’t have to bend to other people’s will, a lighthouse people are attracted to and come to. Usually at this point, when we talk about this kind of depth with stuff, people’s heads are usually kind of spinning and they go into what I call processing.

This would be a good opportunity for you guys to sit down with yourself and just write like journal and do some introspection personally, what do I need to shift? Because the voice within you right now is speaking things to you internally, telling you things you deserve or should be doing, and you need to listen to that voice. That’s what you need to do next is take action on that stuff and trust that voice. You’re in a state of processing. People look like they’re going to outer space where you’re in person. That’s where you’re zoning out.

Interviewee: We’ll do that. Jason, I appreciate you coming on.