DGS 352: Reputation Can Make or Break Property Management

Your reputation is being built with every client, every interaction, and every decision you make, but are you actually managing it? 

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull talk about the impact reputation has on the growth of a property management business and why trust needs to be at the center of the relationships you build. 

They discuss how questionable sales tactics can damage trust before a relationship even begins, why choosing the wrong clients can lead to bigger reputation problems, and how word of mouth can quickly influence the way people see your company.

You’ll Learn

[00:00] Introduction and why reputation matters
[02:18] Building business relationships on trust
[04:17] How the wrong clients hurt your reputation
[07:20] Why reputation impacts word-of-mouth growth
[10:38] Managing your reputation intentionally
[12:58] Making the invisible work visible
[16:49] Taking ownership as a business owner
[19:44] How leadership shapes company culture
[22:01] Rebuilding trust after reputation damage
[25:10] Protecting your reputation for long-term growth

Quotables

“Relationships are built on trust.” — Jason Hull 

“The product you're selling is trust.” — Jason Hull 

“If you're the business owner, the buck stops with you.” — Jason Hull 

“If you shatter your reputation, like you don't have anything left.” — Sarah Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:02)

All right, five, four, three, two, one. Hello everybody. I'm Jason Hull. This is Sarah Hull, founder and CEO of DoorGro, and owner and COO of DoorGrow. And we are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for 18 years and we would love to help you grow your business. All right, so let's get into the show. I'm shortening it up today. It's a little long.

 

I keep getting shorter. Maybe next time it'll just be like, hey, we're door grow and let's get into it. All right. So today what came up on one of our coaching calls, we were talking about what maybe we should talk about. And one of the group coaching calls where clients get on and they ask questions and they share their wins. Somebody was asking about a residence benefits package and they were saying they were talking to two different companies. And then everybody started chiming in negatively.

 

on one of those companies when he had mentioned the two companies. This because it's a mastermind. So people are like, yeah, this vendor, they have a bad reputation, they're negative, this sort of thing. And it really made me think. So so what we're going to talk about today is reputation and how important it is to manage your reputation, how important that is to impacting or affecting word of mouth and growth of your company and all of that sort of stuff. So

 

Cool. All right. And this isn't the th so there was this instance. There was also we got a client on recently and they came to us. They were from a had come from a BDM supplier, a BDM business development manager, which is for those that don't know, a salesperson for property management. They'd come from one of these BDM sort of coaching consulting companies that does placement. That's in the in in the ni industry. And they had

 

They were on their fourth BDM from this company. And they had had a pretty bad experience. And so they were talking negatively about this other company. actually, I got two clients on recently that had similar experience with this BDM coaching company, and they said similar things. So let's go back to the mass rank call. So they were talking about the resident benefits package.

 

And talking bad about one vendor. And then they s they were everybody started talking positively about the other vendor. And these are kind of two big competitors. One's been in the industry a long a long time, has a good reputation, and they've been sponsors at our events, and the other one is maybe a newer kid on the block and is resorting to some interesting tactics to get clients. So what have you heard that they're doing to get clients? I think you heard.

 

That they were, weren't they calling and pretending to be an investor? Yeah, something for property manager. Something like this, some sort of shady tactic of calling up, pretending to be somebody interested in property management so they could get in contact with the business owner who often is acting as the BDM or salesperson. You know, it's a clever tactic. Can it work? Yes. What's the challenge with this? Well

 

Relationships are built on trust. If you're going to use a vendor, if somebody's going to use you as a property manager, the product you're selling is trust. They don't really care about property management. They wanted somebody they can trust that's going to have their interests in mind and take care of their property that they can trust to do the right thing. Because they're giving you control and you can do a lot of things that are not the right thing or that are unethical.

 

And it's not a real ethical strategy to trick or manipulate the people you're trying to sell to to start the relationship. So going back to the BDM companies, when I asked the the BDMs of these these two coaching clients we took on, and we were g they want me to help them get their BDMs up to speed and give them good strategy, I said, What strategies were they giving you to do? And they said, Well, it was mostly just

 

sales role play in learning sales. I'm like, what about growth? And they said, Well, they had us cold calling or calling, you know, and pretending to be tenants or be interested in the rental property. And then we would flip it. And I'm like, So you're starting it out you're starting a relationship of trust by first being untrustworthy and like destroying trust and and the BDM, the gal, she said, Yeah, I didn't I didn't really like it either.

 

Now maybe they have better strategies than this. Maybe these BDMs weren't doing a good job. We'll find out as they're in our programs, see if they're gonna put in the work, do the things we teach them and tell them to do, which is not that because we believe in trust. But but th similar sort of issue. You can't start a relationship out that is going to be founded and based on trust with by destroying the very thing it should be founded on and then expect you're gonna have a good relationship or that they're gonna wanna buy from you. So

 

That's my quick two cents on that. Why didn't this deal close? I don't understand. Yeah. Why why am I not getting business why is my business struggling to grow? Well, what are you doing? Lying to people? well. Talking to them. Yeah. Like we start out strong. So, you know, we I I've been at this for like eighteen years. Door girls existed for a long time. You know, and

 

There's been people that have complained about us. And so the other f side of the coin of this is that you have to be really careful about the clients that you take on. Cause if you take on bad clients or cheap clients or clients with a really broken mindset or that are really negative active, as I would call it, meaning they're constantly looking to destroy everything. They're always looking to find fault in everything. You know those kind of clients. Though they're really difficult for you to deal with.

 

If you don't qualify your your clientele and you bring on anybody, you're going to have some crappy clients like that. And if you have crappy clients, they're going to give you bad reviews and they're going to be negative about everything and they're going to find fault. Are we perfect to DoorGro? Absolutely not. However, all of our stuff is proven. We have clients that have gotten great results on every single growth engine strategy that we teach, but we've had clients in the past that we didn't do a good job qualifying them, brought them in and

 

They didn't even for some reason pay attention to what we told them they were buying. And then they thought, well, I paid 10 grand for a website and didn't get a result, which the website was like a minor piece that we threw in as part of the process. And they just didn't do any of the work to get the doors. And it was about teaching them strategies to get doors and helping them optimize the front end of the business. And so you have to be careful about the clients that you take on because the clients that you take on.

 

d eventually determine the the reputation you're going to have and the reviews that you're going to get. Like a lot of property management companies have negative reviews. The number one way to prevent negative reviews is don't work with certain tenants and certain owners. That's it. Like the that's the easiest way to filter out negative reviews is to filter out bad clo customers. And a lot of times we don't pay attention to that. That's been a mistake that I've made in the past. We've gotten better at that.

 

Yeah. In general we have really good clients. I think our biggest frustration with some of our clients is really they just sometimes don't do the work. That's probably it. Like we generally attract really good clients, but sometimes they just really don't want to do the work to go outdoors or do the work to to grow. And sometimes it takes them a f several months to figure out that they're not a salesperson or that they just aren't really gonna do the work. And that's where we have a little

 

conversation with them about maybe stepping into one of our other offers where we place a salesperson for them or where w we ought become their salesperson for them because they realize they don't really like sales. We can hear do you hear your dog? We can hear my my dog is outside my office. You can't probably hear it, but he's groaning and whining. My dog loves me. He can't like be without me for like what, a few minutes?

 

Hans, you're okay. Relax. I'm the Poor baby. Okay. Now he's barking. He's just gonna get louder and louder. We're gonna have to end this soon. I know quite a few of our videos. He can hear us talking. He's like, Why are they not paying attention to me?

 

So reputation is king, right? It it it matters a lot. It ha impacts word of mouth. It you know, just like on today's well, yesterday's coaching call, with clients, this business that's trying to get customers, they're gonna have a hard time because everybody on that call heard negative things about this company and said, Steer clear. And I know there's bad actors.

 

That are competitors of mine that like to say negative things about me and about DoorGrow. And sometimes not usually about me though. No.

 

Which is fascinating. They they sometimes act like you don't exist. I don't I know, it's really funny. They don't want to attack a woman. Maybe that's it, 'cause they're Muslimer dudes. But

 

I have in the past, but it doesn't work out well anyway. It doesn't really have a good impact. It's funny. But yeah, there's a lot of people that will say negative things about your business. The other thing is you have to be able you have to be willing to put yourself out there. You have to put out content, you have to put out testimonials, you have to show evidence that these what these people are saying is not true. If it isn't. And maybe some of the companies that I mentioned, I didn't mention their names, but that I alluded to on this call.

 

Maybe they're good business. Maybe they do have good growth engines and good ways to scale a business for BDMs. Maybe they do have a good residence benefits package program, but they aren't managing their reputation well. They're taking certain actions. Maybe sometimes it's our onboarding isn't good enough and clients have a bad experience and then don't get the results. Sometimes we don't do a good good enough job on the hiring piece or filtering out people that we bring in, just like the BDM company had.

 

probably hired three bad BDMs for this company. The fourth one that they have now, I vetted and I think they did a good job with. But the other ones were probably not the personality fit based on what they had said. Like one of them quit and got a job as an operator in a company and it's a whole different personality type than sales. And so yeah, so you know, part of it's developing your skill set, improving, r reducing things like churn and all these different things that

 

Com compound and have impact. And then I think the biggest, even for us, is we got to make sure you bring on good clients. Like if you bring on bad clients, they will always complain and get bad results and they will blame you and they will go tell other people about it because these are people that are not accountable, they don't take ownership, and they're not going to blame themselves. And so you got to be careful of that. So you know the ones that are, you know, it's your fault that something broke at the property. It's like, I didn't realize.

 

that I was in charge of things breaking or not. I didn't know I had that power. Well why did you allow that to break? I'm sorry, what? I had no idea I could control that. News to me. But no matter what, you know, they're they're just they're not happy. It's it's it's almost like there's not a way to make them happy. And they just like being miserable and they like complaining about things.

 

No matter what. No matter what, you can call them and tell them great news and you're like, This is really good. I finally have some good news to deliver to them and they will still find a way to be upset about something. Yeah. And you know, it could be that even the clients that I brought on recently that were complaining about other companies, we could be the next company they complain about. Sometimes it's the common denominator is the client. And so that could be the case. So we'll find out. Like if they do the work, they get the results. Our stuff's proven.

 

But sometimes people just want somebody else to be at fault and want to blame somebody else and they don't really want to put in the work or take action. So I think we did it. Or fix their property. Yeah. Take care of things. Yeah. I don't want to have to do that. I can't believe you're asking me to They don't want to do it. Yeah. So so be intentional about managing your reputation. Be intentional about

 

PR, like public relations, make sure you're putting out a good message into the marketplace because if you leave it up to the most motivated people to dictate the what your reputation looks like online and publicly, usually it's gonna be the no it noisiest, which are usually the angriest or the worst. They've got a vendetta, they've got a grudge, they had a they had a bad day, maybe it wasn't even about you, but they need somebody to take it out on. You become

 

Scapegoat, you become the the company they want to attack and they want to get their frustrations out on you. And so then, yeah. And so you've got to have evidence, you've got to have ways to manage this. So, you know, if if somebody came at me and attacked me in the past, I was very willing to s to reply to that comment. And I would just say, here's what we told them to do. They didn't never they did not do this. Here's what they actually bought. They only use this part. Like, you know, so.

 

And then they can decide whether they want to keep that review up because it makes their company look bad, right? So yeah, so you gotta be careful about who you take on, be careful about how you manage your customers. And then you gotta be careful about managing your reputation so you make sure that you're constantly putting out a good message. The other thing we talk about a lot with clients is the principle of making the invisible visible. Do you wanna chat about that just real quick? You can. Okay.

 

All right, I'll talk about it. You can't here here's I don't know. I d I think sometimes people go too much here. They do too much on the They do they you they do like my clients never knew anything that was going on and they were perfectly happy but Yeah because I didn't bother them on anything. I wasn't They trusted you, they knew you were in control. Yeah, yeah. You hear from me, it's like not great news.

 

The only time really that they would kind of get an update almost or hear that kind of stuff was on some sort of like portfolio review call. Yes. Where I was intentional about making sure that they knew, you know, hey, here's here's what we're doing. I would say probably the biggest for me anyway, the biggest time that this was really happening was COVID. Okay. That was like the loudest that I ever was with my clients.

 

Yeah. There was a lot of panic. Yeah, a lot of anxiety. And man, and especially in my market, it was bad. Like we already had a hard time getting tenants to pay. Yeah. And then they had a real legitimate reason to not pay. Yeah. And I I mean, I was nervous about it. I knew my clients were nervous about it. And there were most tenants just did what they were supposed to do. Some tenants took advantage of it and some were just kind of, you know, caught in

 

bad situation because of it. But in COVID it like I had I felt like I had to let people know like here's what we are doing and here's what we're not doing and you know if we're you know changing like we're not even allowed to at one point we weren't even allowed to do an inspection on properties. Yeah which is weird. We also weren't allowed to do any maintenance. Like they stopped maintenance. Yeah that's crazy. Like what? How does that work?

 

So it was really weird, but if if if the state makes it so that you cannot send a contractor out to a property, and whether it's a contractor or the owner or a handyman, it doesn't matter who it is, but cannot send somebody out to a property to make a repair. That was the law. And I had to tell my clients that.

 

For right now, here's the situation. we'll see how that pans out, I guess, and hopefully there's no repairs that need to be done that are major. So like little repairs, you know, we're holding off on those and major repairs, I guess we'll tackle that if and when we come to it. So that was probably the time that I was really the the loudest about making sure everyone knew what I was actually doing. Yeah, my general policy has always been if if somebody has a problem

 

You want to go as deep as possible. So it's like communicate with them as direct as possible as a client, which means usually pick up the phone rather than just text them, you know, something that's gonna cause drama. But I think that's an email blast. But well, with something like that where it's everybody, yeah, just you can do an email blast. But but the the principle of making them visible visible is a lot of what you do as a property manager manager is invisible. So the assumption is you're doing nothing. So

 

And doing an annual review with your clients is a great opportunity to point out all the good that you've done for them. Maybe right after you've onboarded a client and the first rent check's been deposited and they've got that in their bank account, that'd be a great time to do your first owner review. And that's an opportunity to point out all the good that you've done for them, point out the work that you've been involved in, everything that you've handled, all the phone calls you've handled, all this kind of stuff that they have not had to deal with.

 

So that they now can see, there's value here that you're providing, rather than just expecting them to somehow know. and then, yeah, setting really strong boundaries so they trust you and they're not just communicating with you all the time is also something we talk about a lot. so that's another way that you can manage expectations and manage your perception and your reputation with the people that you're dealing with. So this is just

 

Something that came to mind from our coaching call this week. And so we wanted to pass it along to you, is make sure you're managing your reputation. You know, I've got one other example. So we've had some clients, occasionally clients sometimes have a hard time paying us. They have financial issues. And there's sometimes there's those clients that just repeatedly have financial problems. They're just they're not putting in the work to figure out how to grow their business.

 

They want to do it. They're paying us to teach them how to do it, but they just don't actually put in the time or the hours to do it because they probably really don't want to. They don't really think it's fun. I don't know. And so they're avoiding it. And so, and then they aren't making the money. And then it becomes kind of a financial burden because our program's not cheap. And so then they're trying to pay for the program. So then they have payment problems. Now, if people continually have problems paying us and things like this, it's frustrating because then our team have to get involved. We have to shell out money.

 

And so then our team starts to have a perception about this business owner, like, hey, what's going on with them? They're not doing the work, they're not making the money, and they're not paying us. And then it gets frustrating for us as a team because we want our clients to win and we love our clients and we want to see them succeed. But when we get in a situation like this, we're now instead of like supporting them, coaching them, we're having to follow up, trying to get payment and see how they're doing and they're not they're ignoring us or avoiding our emails or

 

not responding to things, either they're bad at managing their emails and or they are seeing our emails requesting payment and they're just ignoring us, which I guess is even worse when it comes to integrity. But if you're out of state of integrity, which means you're not being honest with yourself, like you sign up for a program to get coaching, but you and they give you actions to take and you don't do the actions. You're out of integrity with yourself. You're like, I know I should do this.

 

Just like I should go work out, but I don't do it. Then I feel guilty or beat myself up or I'm out of integrity with myself, right? You got to be real and honest with yourself. And then you end up not paying people. Now there's you're creating a perception issue. And maybe this goes into other areas of their business. Maybe they struggle paying vendors. Maybe they struggle paying other people. And this is going to impact your reputation in the marketplace. So you want to make sure that you're taking care of things and you're putting in the work to get stuff done.

 

There's there's if you're the business owner, the buck stops with you. If you're the business owner, it's your responsibility. Nobody else on your team unless you can delegate effectively. And if you can't, it's your fault. It's always on your shoulders. And so you have to take ownership of that. There's a great book on the subject by I think Patrick Lincioni called The Motive. And it's about the different two different motives of a CEO. There's the one where you think, well, I'm so above it all, everybody else should do stuff.

 

And there's the one that realizes the true role of the CEO is to do whatever it takes. If you own a McDonald's and you're the franchise owner and somebody didn't show up to flip burgers, if you can't fill this spot, you're flipping burgers. That's the responsibility of the CEO. You're doing whatever needs to be done to make the business work. And there's a lot of different things that Sarah and I have to step into to take care of sometimes. That's what business owners do in your own business. And so

 

If you aren't the one stepping in to do things, you're going to end up also sometimes with a bad reputation. Now, we want to create a, you know, a lifeboat. We want to escape from that. We don't want to be doing all the frontline work. That's why we build teams. But you can't build a team if you can't even lead yourself and be have integrity with yourself and do the things that you know you should be doing. Your team are going to pick up on that and go, that's the culture here. We just sort of half ass stuff. We just, we sort of pay vendors and people on time.

 

We don't take care of things the way we should. We're told to do actions and we'll do some of them. That's not the kind of culture that you want to build. So ultimately the culture you create is going to be based on who you show up as and who you are and the type of team you allow to be in your business. Another factor to consider. Aaron Stokes used to talk about that. Do you remember his story? What story? Was building his his business and he was getting pretty successful.

 

And I think it was a team member stole from him like a lot of money. Not just like, yeah, it was like a hundred bucks or a thousand dollars. It was a lot of money. Like thousands, thousands, many, multiple thousands of dollars. And that obviously really messed things up. he had he didn't have funds to pay

 

Some of the vendors that they had worked with. Yeah. He didn't have funds to pay some of his loans that he had taken out, like rent or mortgage on buildings that he had, or you know, and it really it was even like I don't know if I can pay my team at that point. Yeah. It was I mean it was He could have declared bankruptcy he had mentioned. He I think he almost did because it was it was well over it was six figures. It's not just like a little

 

amount of money, it was a lot of money and it was not by his own doing. Yeah. Like he didn't mess it up. Yeah. but he allowed someone onto his team and gave them access and didn't pay attention. And therefore he admitted fault for it. He's like, I didn't do it, but it's on me. Yeah. He owned it. And he knew this was gonna sink him.

 

And it it just about did. Yeah. And he worked really, really, really hard for a very long time to rebuild things. Yeah. And clean things up. But the problem is once once they burn those bridges, like it's very hard to, you know, restore things. It's not impossible. It's just hard. and he worked for a very long time and up until the day he died, he would pay the invoice as soon as he got it.

 

Yeah. It didn't matter. And he said, I I I don't care. Like if today is August sixth and it's due on the 30th, but you sent it to me today, I'm paying it. So he just created this mentality then of we we pay things early. We don't we don't wait. We never pay late. We always pay early. When we get it, we pay it, and that's it. And I don't care where the money comes from, we're we're paying it early. And he said, Because I'm never, never

 

gonna have my reputation on the line like that again. He said that did so much damage. He said there the the the damage to the business and the team and the finances and you know the the the assets, that's that's all one thing. But it's a relatively simple mess to clean up. What you can't really clean up as easily is the bad reputation that now you have. Because now you're the guy that defaults on loans.

 

Now you're the guy that says you're gonna pay somebody and you don't. Now you're the guy that doesn't pay your team who worked for you. Now you're the guy who takes out a loan and you're not even good for it. So that was devastating to him. And he worked up until the day he died to make sure that his reputation he wanted people to know we are good for the money. And we will always be good for the money. And I don't care what we have to do, we will

 

Figure it out and we will be good for the money. So they paid invoices as soon as they got them. They wanted to pay them early. And they knew they were on top of everything. That's why I think he was so deep in he did a very deep dive into his finances and he understood a PL probably with the best accountants on this planet. He could go toe-to-toe and line by line. And if something was off by a few cents, he would go, that's

 

That's not right. There's something wrong here. And he did that all because of that experience. But it damaged his reputation so badly that he had to work so hard to get that back. And it was hard to get that back. It's hard once you mess it up like that to get trust back from people. But once you get that trust back from someone, you can never, never, never break it again. So he had to be very diligent and make sure that he was really on top of everything because he said if you

 

If you shatter your reputation, like you don't have anything left. Yeah. You can build any business you want to, but not on a bad reputation. Yeah. When we were in that mass run with Aaron Soakes and Sharon Shrivatsa, you know, Sharon would say fame is the most efficient business model. And the opposite of that would be having a bad reputation. And so it's the least efficient business model is to have a bad reputation in the marketplace.

 

So yeah, Aaron worked really hard. He also negotiated with all the vendors. He let them know the situation. He said, This is what I can do. He made payment plans. Like he kept he communicated with all of them and he sorted it out with them. he didn't just ghost them. He didn't like avoid them. He didn't, you know, like we've had happen to us. Yeah. Yeah. He did he did do the right thing and contact everyone and he did what he could. And I I he did pay off everything.

 

Yeah, you got it all paid off. Never declare bankruptcy. Everybody was taken care of. They paid his motto was pay everything early. Cool. So there's some ideas. I think this is a good place to to wrap up. If you are interested in growing your property management business, you're struggling

 

You don't have really high profit margin. You're like 10% or worse, 20% or worse. And you would like to get really good margins in your business. You would like to get your team and systems really well dialed in. You would like to get adding more doors and get your growth engines installed and growing. Reach out to us at DoorGrow. I think we're the best in the world at helping people do this. We would love to help you. and that being said, to our mutual growth. I hope everybody wins and has success. And until next time, bye everyone.

 

All right. Baby Hans. He's whining. Bye everyone.