DGS 318: The Hidden Thief in Your Property Management Business

How often are you interrupted in your property management business? Tenant and owner phone calls, emails, maintenance requests, team member questions… it’s an endless cycle of wasted time and stolen profits.

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss the hidden thief in every property management business: the Interruption Burglar.

You’ll Learn

[01:23] The Burglar Stealing From Your Business 

[07:41] Becoming Aware of Your Company’s Time Loss

[13:20] If Your Business Isn’t Growing, It is Dying

Quotables

“There's a burglar that lives inside everybody's business.”

“One interruption is going to cost you somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes of wasted labor.”

“All it takes is questions to make you conscious of things you're unconscious of currently.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

Nobody can even see this guy running around stealing until we do some of these exercises with our clients.

And then they start to become conscious and they can now see this interruption burglar sneaking around, stealing money, stealing profits, wasting everybody's time.

Welcome everybody. We are Jason and Sarah Hull the owners of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses, helping them add doors.

improve pricing, increase profit, simplify operations, and we run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. We are the best in the world. And at DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to relationships, real estate deals, and residual income. And our mission at DoorGrow.

is to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. All right, so today, Sarah and I thought we would chat about, she said, you've been wanting to talk about this for a little while. So we're going to be chatting about what? Interruption. All right, specifically,

the interruption burglar. So maybe I'm dating myself a little bit, but I don't know if you remember the Hamburglar. I do. McDonald's, okay, all right, that's good. so for those of you listening, maybe you remember like McDonald's had the Hamburglar and he was this sneaky, creepy guy going around stealing people's cheeseburgers, right? And there's another burglar. There's a burglar that lives inside everybody's business.

and it's the interruption burglar. And the interruption burglar is stealing your money by interrupting. And so every interruption in a business is a hidden thief stealing from your business. And most business owners give a blank check out to every tenant and owner that they bring on that says, call me whenever you want to, interrupt me whenever you want to, steal all my profits.

And a lot of property managers think they have to talk to everybody and that's what they're paid to do. And so they have to always be available. So we're going to kind of throw a wrench into that sort of level of thinking because we've talked to lot of clients get out of the trap of lacking profit, lacking margin by helping them escape or eliminate or tear up this blank check and eliminate the interruption burglar, or at least put some guardrails around that guy.

so according to Gary Keller's book, The One Thing, it cites a study saying that one interruption costs 18 minutes of productivity. Dan Martel's book about time management says I think it's like 26 minutes of productivity. So I don't know if we're just that much worse when we get interrupted now. But basically

One interruption is going to cost you somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes of wasted labor. Why? Because when we get interrupted, if we're in the flow or we're working on things and we're being productive as a team member or as a CEO or COO or whatever our role is, we get interrupted. We then have to rebuild that house of cards that we were in the middle of working on, figure out where was I, what was I working on,

you know, kind of reestablish our thinking, get back into the groove of what we were trying to accomplish, what we were working on, especially when we're trying to get into deep work where things get really productive and effective. And so one interruption, if it happens every 20 minutes or so, which in a property management business is not hard to do, you may find you feel like you're just spinning your wheels or your team members are working and busy all day long, but they're not actually producing a whole lot of output.

And so this can be very expensive in a property management business. Not only that, but usually a lot of times the interruptions are internal. So you ever heard of sneaker net? Like somebody walks into your office, it's the most inefficient network ever, and then you're like, hey, do you got a minute? Or I have this question, and maybe you're the person they're all coming to ask questions to because you're the boss, and they're interrupting you all the time. And so then you're like, well, getting interrupted. And now you've got two people.

One's interrupting the other and you're wasting a lot of labor. And then we set up scenarios in which one person has the ability to interrupt multiple people in the business. This is where we set up Slack channels and other stupid communication methodologies that people think is more productive, where there's one too many communication, which becomes one too many interruptions. So one interruption, instead of costing you like maybe 15, 20 minutes of labor or a half hour of labor,

It can quadruple. It can be 10 people at a time. It can be really expensive. And then, you know, sometimes, you know, one's interrupting the other. So you've got it's doubling. You know, people are just wasting your time and money. And so it's really easy for you to lose all of your profits and all your margins to staff through interruptions and a lack of productivity. And we see people get stuck at small door counts on a per

person basis. They're like, I can only manage 50 units by myself, or a property manager with a whole team, I can only manage 100 units. And a lot of people think, well, that's pretty good, but it's not. Sarah managed 265 at her peak, basically by herself. Eventually had one part-time person. I had one part-time person. Yeah, eventually. was part-time, but between us we

You weren't even a full-time equivalent. Yeah, and that's because you had eliminated a lot of interruptions because you just didn't want to deal with them. And you set really good boundaries.

Well, yeah, which was to not be interrupted. Yeah. So cool. So that's the interruption burglar. This is one of the things we help clients figure out. We help them figure out how do we eliminate the interruptions? How do we create better, healthier, more effective communication systems

Sometimes your clients do this. Sometimes your team members do it. Yeah. We've got to be able to separate ourselves where we can and reduce or completely eliminate interruptions. Yeah. That's the goal. So we have methodologies that we take our clients through to, one, identify their own

interruptions, the things that are interrupting them. And then we have a process for taking their team through a process so that they become conscious of the interruptions so that they can, everybody in the business can start to protect the business from this interruption burglar because interruption burglar, sneaky. Nobody can even see this guy running around stealing until we do some of these exercises with our clients.

And then they start to become conscious and they can now see this interruption burglar sneaking around, stealing money, stealing profits, wasting everybody's time. And nobody likes the interruptions anyway. So by reducing them, everybody's happier. Even the people that are interrupting you, like tenants and owners are happier and less anxious. If you set better guardrails, better expectations, better boundaries, they actually can trust you more to do the job instead of feeling like they need to micromanage the person that's managing

their rental property, which is ridiculous. Why don't they just cut you out if they're going to micromanage something, right? So yeah, they don't need to do that. Okay. I don't know what else we need to say about this, but. Well, one of the things that I had created recently within the last two months was a time optimization assessment that you can go through and take and you can do it every day.

Kind of get a grade and a score and see what went well and what didn't go so well and then it will help you figure out what can you optimize and what can you change and You can do that even Right now so if you would like to get access to that it's a longer link So it's not like I can just give you the URL to it So I would say the easiest way to get it if you would like access to it is just email me and Sarah

doorgrow.com s-a-r-a-h at doorgrow.com So if you'd like that I would be very happy to send you the link and you can use that as long as you would like but you'll essentially go through answer a couple of questions and then it will email you your results and your score so it will tell you overall you know what were the things that didn't go so well and Oftentimes when you're filling a report out like this at the end of the day

It just makes you very conscious of it because sometimes our days tend to get away from us and they wonder then at the end of the day, man, how did that happen? I didn't get to that thing that I really wanted to do. Man, I was busy all day long, but I just don't feel like I was very productive or I don't feel like I got to the things that I wanted to get to. Well, this will help you while you're answering these questions.

It'll just point to a few things that you can optimize. And sometimes I've tested this out with our clients a few times too. go, ⁓ as they're taking this assessment and just answering the questions, they're going, well, I can already tell what kind of day this was. This was not good. This was not good. This was not good. And then the good news is just by taking that assessment, you have a better idea of how to approach things and hopefully a better plan for the following day.

Sometimes all it takes is questions to make you conscious of things you're unconscious of currently. And when we're unconscious of the interruption burglar, he gets away with murder. Like he's just stealing your money. So we've got to stop that guy. All right. So we've got a sponsor. So let me share that with everybody real quick. We appreciate our sponsors. So our sponsor today is Blanket.

And Blanket is a property retention and growth platform that helps property managers stop losing doors, add more revenue and increase the number of properties they manage. Wow, your clients with a branded investor dashboard and an off market marketplace, while your team gets all the tools they need to identify owners at risk of churning and powerful systems to help you add more doors. And so it helps you retain the doors, even if your clients sell or leave. You can keep the

the units, it's really a cool system. I recommend everybody uses it. And we coach and recommend our clients use it. I think it's a great system. So. For sure. All right. I think also we had just had our clients go through a time optimization challenge. We did. Using some of the things that we talk about in the program, some of the components that we coach on and some of the things that you will see in that time optimization assessment. Not all of the things, but.

Some of the things in the assessment are on there and then of course there's a lot more. So what we've noticed and what a lot of people had noticed when they went through that assessment and that challenge is, wow, there is a lot of time in the business that just gets eaten up by different things and it's not hard at all to get lost. It's not hard to kind of get consumed by the day to day.

It's not hard to get lost in all of the tasks that are required by a property management company. And this really goes for you and it goes for your team. Because just looking at every person's time on the team can be really, really helpful. One person might be wildly efficient. And if that person that's efficient is, let's say, the business owner, the business owner might.

assume then, well, everybody on my team is really efficient because I'm really efficient. And that may not be the case. So our goal is to help you figure out, you know, who is efficient and who is using their time wisely and perhaps who is not. So that way we can figure out what are the things that we can shift? What are the things that we can change? And oftentimes it's not even really hard to change.

you know what you're doing or how you're doing it. It is different and it can sometimes feel uncomfortable because you just have to do things differently. And I think in the world of property management and especially how things are running today is everyone assumes that you need to just be responding to everything immediately and be on top of everything and be super communicative with everybody.

That's not always the case. That may not get you the best results. So it can create a lot of work. But being busy and being productive are two very different things. So it's our goal always to help property managers figure out what can I do to actually be more productive? And how can I make sure that somebody on the team is always having time to focus on the income generating activities?

Because if you are not focusing on growth in the business, it is slowly dying. So if there's no one who's focused on growth or if there's one person who's just a little bit, it's like, well, I do it for, you know, five hours a week when I can. And when I'm not busy doing all of these other things, what's happening is we just get stuck on this hamster wheel where it's kind of like Groundhog Day. You wake up.

You do things, you make no progress. You think, I'll do it again tomorrow. You wake up, you do a whole bunch of things, you're busy, but you're not making progress. And then that day just repeats over and over and over. So we're just spending all of our time doing all of these things that aren't actually helping the business grow or helping the business make progress. You're just doing the day-to-day tasks and then it's really hard to grow because sometimes it gets scary to grow.

And they go, well, if I'm this busy at 40 units, there's no way I can handle 80. There's no way I can handle 150. There's no way I can handle 500. And if you're running the 500 units the same way you're running the 40 units, the answer is yes, there's no way you can do it. So you need to just look at doing it a different way. Yeah.

Yeah, you need to start running your business the way you would at a thousand doors when you have a small amount of doors because it's going to be completely different. And a lot of people, when they first start out, think they need to please everybody, take care of everybody in a special way, and they don't set healthy boundaries. They take on too difficult a clients. They make a lot of mistakes. So by optimizing your time and our goal with our clients isn't just to make you more productive. Our goal with clients is to make sure as a business owner that you are

more fulfilled, that you're enjoying your day more. It's not just about being able to somehow accomplish and do more work. The goal really is for you to do more of the things you enjoy and less of the things that you don't enjoy. And so usually for most business owners, that very first exit you need to do in the business is to exit doing the frontline work. If you can make it past that,

everything gets a lot easier, it's a lot nicer. But when you're doing frontline work, or when you have an entire team, but they're asking you questions on how to always do or make decisions about the frontline work, you're not out of the frontline work. And so you got to exit the frontline work, then you got to exit managing everybody. And then you got to, the next step is then you're like a CEO or you're a leader and you might want to go to some higher levels of exit, but.

A lot of people can't escape the frontline work. They can't figure out how to do that. So they just sell the whole business. They jump all the way to the last exit. They're like, let's go. I need freedom. And then they go start another business and they kind of paint themselves into a corner again and they're miserable. So there's a very simple path that we can take clients through to help them get that freedom. And so if you feel like you're frustrated and you're asking this question all the time, like, why won't my team?

just think for themselves. It's because you've built the wrong business. The business is not built around you. The business is built around the business, which means you are now the servant to the business instead of the reverse. And so you built the wrong business, which means you also built the wrong team and you can't see it. Sometimes it takes some outside perspective to get perspective so that you can see it. And that's one of the things we enjoy helping our clients figure out. Sometimes replacing their entire team.

And yeah, if you've if you're not enjoying your day to day role and you have an entire team, you built the wrong team because you built it around the wrong person. You're showing up wearing hats and doing things in the business that you shouldn't be doing because you're not the best at this. You're not somebody that enjoys it. And I guarantee if there's certain hats or roles you're wearing or holding on to right now that you don't enjoy, somebody else out there would be better at it than you. And I know that's humbling to think in the beginning.

It's a very humbling thing to see, a team member and see them perform better than you, outperform you. But ultimately smart business owners know that you want to build a team of people that are better at the stuff you don't enjoy. Because if you don't enjoy it, you're never going to be great at it. We've got a lot of tactics. We've got a lot of methodologies. There's a lot of little things we could share about that.

but in interest of time, if you're interested, Sarah's already offered very generously her cool assessment. Send an email to Sarah with an H at doorgrow.com. It's got to the H otherwise I don't get it. If you spell my name wrong then you don't make the top of it. Wow, okay, yeah. No patience for that. right. Cool. All right. Well, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to the next level, reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com.

For a free training on how to get unlimited free leads, text the word LEADS to 512-648-4608. And we will send you a hour long training that shows you how to get unlimited leads for free in your property management business. That will blow your mind. Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners at doorgrowclub.com

And if you'd like to get the best ideas in property management, join our newsletter at doorgrow.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe And until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.