Are you looking for more out of your annual planning process? Many professional property management companies are in the same boat, but don’t know what questions they should be asking when it comes to improving that process.
In the newest episode of Triple Win Property Management, join industry experts Marc Cunningham and Gwenn Aspen as they dive into how to optimize your annual planning process with questions like
- Who should be involved?
- What questions should you be asking?
- How do you organize your KPIs?
Questions or thoughts on the topics we covered? Send us an email.
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Season 3 Episode 19 features Marc Cunningham and Gwenn Aspen
The Triple Win Property Management Podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature
Episode Transcript
Marc Cunningham
On those lunch meetings. That’s why Emmett asked this question every time. Hey, if you were me, what would you be doing differently if you were running this company today? What do you think? What would you change? What are the things we’re doing wrong? What are the opportunities we’re not taking advantage of? Like, I’m going to throw that out there to every single one of them during that lunch meeting. That’s going to give me a great starting point.
Andrew Smallwood
I get to introduce my good friends who probably need no introduction, because if you’re a fan of PM Build or you’re a fan of, okay, Mark, is it is it the property Management Business podcast? Is that the title? I think that’s the title of your podcast. Yeah, that’s what it’s the property management business market. Perfect. Awesome. Great podcast. Highly recommend. I’ve loved the episodes I’ve been able to catch so far. Mark puts out some great content on YouTube and through email regularly, so I’ll just put in a plug there. I love Mark as a great resource here. And then we’ve got Gwen Aspen, none other than Gwen. Anequim was getting shout-outs earlier today as Cameron was speaking, I know Angela is a big fan and it talks about the transformation Anequim has had on her business, So love your expertise both in your history as an operator, building a business well over a thousand doors, and then also working with a number of property management businesses and supporting and through that, through the Anequim business. It’s great to have both of you here today and talking about this topic and we’re going to get right into it. Here’s the first question. I want to go with this. As people are approaching this, you know, and maybe some people have already started the process, but some people are probably getting ready to start this process and, you know, would love for you to start with, as you think about before actually doing the act of annual planning or strategic planning, what are some of the things people should think about in preparation or in leading up to that to make that effective? And Gwen, we’ll start with you first, then come to Mark.
Gwenn Aspen
Sure, so I’ve come to strategic planning all the way from making a million errors in the past. So this is all just because I did all the things wrong. But one is I’ve tried to do offsite meetings in like nature and this is a horrible idea. You really do need internet connection when you’re doing these meetings to be effective. So that’s one thing. The other thing to think about is who you really want to be in the room. We’ve done something where we try to be so collaborative that the meeting really got watered down and have been very clear on who the strategic thinkers are in your company and who’s really going to be able to help you set a strong vision forward for the next year mostly, but like up to three years is super important. And also another thing, as I was reflecting on this that has come up a lot is the people in the room have to have the same level of comfort with controversy or conflict because some people in the room, if they are like really nice and Midwestern, they’re not going to do well and they’ll shut down. And if there’s a higher level of conflict, whereas if certain people are, for maybe I’m from Detroit, so we’re like a little rough, you know, over there. So I’m comfortable with a higher level of conflict. And so I feel like we’re not having a good meeting unless we’re like getting really passionate. But that can shut the Midwestern, like really nice people, down. So having a really good discussion even beforehand about what’s allowed, what the rules of engagement are for the meeting really helps it be more successful. So those are the things that I would say are really important off the top of my head.
Andrew Smallwood
I love that, love that. And I love seeing in the comments of people talking about bringing a little East Coast into their meetings and Midwest conflict avoidance. That’s great. Mark, we’d love to come to you next up thinking about in preparation or setting the table for this what are some of the important lessons that you’ve learned or would be helpful to think about?
Marc Cunningham
Yeah well, we talked about this a few days ago online. It was interesting because Gwen and I come at this from vastly different perspectives. The first of course, being, as Gwen said, she’s East Coast mean I’m just nice. I’m a nice person. So, yeah, we both start from very different places that way. But, Gwen talked about how she’s very collaborative and brings in her leadership team and we’ve always not been that way. So my philosophy on that is I want to hear from my people, I want my finger on the pulse. But, but as far as like, collaboration, like what do you think we should do? What do you think we should do? What do you think we should do? That’s that’s kind of you knowing yourself, right? If you need that and if you like that, then great. Do it. That’s not me, right? I want to hear from my people and then I’m going to kind of run this meeting with me. And it is not a right or wrong, but I think that is an important aspect of knowing yourself and knowing the people you wanted there. But do please do not just get everybody in your organization together in a big room or offsite, as Gwen said, even worse for a couple of days and just give everybody an equal voice because that just can lead to chaos. So it’s like you want to know, you know, your who, as Gwen said. And then for us, really the first step in that process or for me to say the first step in that process, the first question I want to ask is what should we stop doing right before I went on next year and before I add more things to the plate that we’re already too busy to do anyway, I want to ask myself what should not only I stopped doing and Cameron talked a little bit about this, right? Like what? What are the things I need to start doing? I need to delegate away, but that needs to be a significant part of the planning, at least for us. It’s step one. What do I need to stop doing it? Just as importantly, what does her company need to stop doing so? So, for example, for us this year we’re going to stop doing lease only type things. That’s where we run out of property, give it back to the owner, and we do for full service management. But we’ll also say, Oh, you just want to find it. You want us to find a tenant for you? Great, we’ll find you the tenant, give it back to you. And that’s a good thing, but it’s not the best thing. So when I say stop doing things, what I don’t mean is like pick out terrible things and stop doing it. Like, I’m. I’m going to stop smoking five packs a day, you know? That’s all we’re talking about. We’re talking about what are the things that your business is doing from the outside looking in, You can say, Yeah, that’s a pretty good thing. But it’s not killing it, right? It’s not just amazing. Or you say, Oh, I would never, ever stop doing that. So we almost fight our rule is like if we find ourselves contemplating stopping doing it, then we should probably stop doing it because the things you shouldn’t stop doing a rather obvious. So if there are those things that you’re like, I don’t know about that, then we’re just going to chop it. And we’ve learned that by doing this now, we create the space for these new things we want to bring on. So the things that we’re going to stop doing, the things that I’m going to stop doing that is kind of the precursor to any of the planning for us.
Andrew Smallwood
Hmm. I want to do a quick follow up with each of you based on a couple of notes that I had down here, because, you know, Mark, one thing I love about you is like you’ve got this great conviction as an operator. And when I listen to you, I also hear like, great challenges of, like conventional wisdom in some area, right? Or like, common practice. Okay. That’s not necessarily just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s a best practice. And thinking about deeply about the why behind you’re doing some things and something that got my attention was like how intentional you are about really taking a pulse on what’s happening in the market and how getting clear on what’s happening in the market, informing what plans you’re setting for next year and where you’re kind of areas of focus are. Could you kind of give a little more detail of like, you know, how you think about that and what your processes for letting the market inform your plans?
Marc Cunningham
So our philosophy for 45 years since our 45th year in business has always been follow the opportunity, like those three words, follow the opportunity. And what we’ve learned is the opportunities typically don’t come from us, from my ideas. The opportunities come from the marketplace. So I can have the grandest plans. I want a house five years ago, if I was like, you know what? We’re going to we’re going to work with accidental landlords. That’s who we’re going after. Well, that wouldn’t work because five years ago it was investors coming in the market. So you’ve got to pay attention to the opportunities that the market is giving you, not just what you want or what you envision type of thing. So when the sales market is hot because we do everything right, we do sales, we do commercial, we do residential, when the sales market is hot. What I literally told my team, the guys, they’ll every property we convince your own clients to sell at all. That’s the opportunity now. Now my job is to figure out how we backfill. But that was the opportunity that little. And then right now, you know, what’s our opportunity and my view in the market, it’s accidental landlords, people saying I would like to sell but I can’t Or maybe I don’t really want to sell because I’ve got a 2.99% interest rates. I’m going to convert this house to real property. That’s the opportunity. The opportunity is an investors. Investors are not buying properties like they were a couple of years ago because interest rates are high and cap rates are low. So they’re not doing it. What’s the opportunity? Accidental investors. So we are pushing that 100% down on the accidental landlord we’re bringing on now. So a year from now that may change. Six months from now, that may change, Right? That’s a big part of this as well. We’ve got to pivot. You’ve got to be ready with this massive plan you put in place, put it in place, and then and then something like COVID happens. But I love I love the Mike Tyson quote. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Right. So, yes, get your plan. But when you get punched in the face on January 2nd, you got to pivot immediately to follow what that biggest opportunity is. So we’re very market driven that way.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that’s great. I love to share that. And Gwen, I had I had a word I wrote down here, although it looks like maybe you’re about to fall somebody up on Mark, so I’ll just throw this out and get out of your way. But I wrote down the word Festivus and it got me, it got me thinking about something you said of easy to overlook what may kind of be going on or on people’s mind in the team that could get in the way of conversation. And I’m wondering if you could add a little bit of color to that.
Gwenn Aspen
Yes. So in my well, I work with my husband. I’ve worked with business partners and my property management company for six years and so what I found through my own experience is that when you have these business partners, sometimes things get thrown under the rug that need to be addressed. And so we like to go into our strategic planning meeting very intentionally. And what that means is that before the meeting takes place, we really review our relationships with all the other owners. The other owners are the key players at the company and make sure that we’re not going into the meeting without airing any grievances or overcoming some kind of barrier. So I don’t know if you guys watch sides. Also, Seinfeld is a show and they have this one. They have Christmas. It’s like Festivus for the rest of us. And it’s a it’s a party where they air their grievances. So we’re just try to make light of it, but just make sure all of the relationships are like cool and everyone’s good and everybody’s happy. And so that way we don’t have an elephant in the room. And when we focus on the strategic planning, we can get to the business at hand instead of having some of the conversation, you know, maybe be like underhand, I don’t know. It can get like messy if that’s not worked out ahead of time. The other thing that we make sure people do is we want to have a really good review of the KPIs and have kind of a report going into the strategic planning session. So we shouldn’t be fooling around on our computers, pulling up a profit and loss during that meeting. All of that should be done on the front end. So we know what last year looks like. Now we’re going to have a 15 minute presentation about what happened or didn’t happen in the previous year, but we just don’t want it to do the actions of finding everything during the meeting because it wastes everybody’s time and is a very expensive meeting. If you have, you know, three well-paid people in the room, if you will. The other thing like Mark, looking at the market opportunity is we just do that in a what I would like the SWOT analysis. So what are our strengths, What are our weaknesses? What are the opportunities which would include market opportunities and what are the threats? And so that SWOT analysis, as well as a real a review of how the prior year went, is how we kind of get a landscape picture of where the company is and that enables us to be strategic and planning for the next year’s initiatives.
Andrew Smallwood
I love that.
Marc Cunningham
I can add something that Andrew, before we move on, just to piggyback on Gwen's statement there on, on your numbers. Right? So, so for us, I’m pretty systematic with this stuff and I said, you know, step one is what are we going stop doing? And for us, this is what Gwen just said for our step two, it’s review our numbers and we do that through really like three different places. So I’m going to review our panel for the year, right, to see where financials are. And then we’re going to review internally what we track. We can’t kind of color our CEO dashboard, and that’s a month by month spreadsheet where we pull, I don’t know, is like 50 random numbers and they are random from our business. Everything from how many Google reviews do we have to how many open work orders do we have to? What’s our average rental rate? What’s our average management suite? What’s our profit margin? How many employees do we have? It’s like a smattering of information, right? So we’re going to review that. And then the third thing that we’re going to review is will we kind of color our trends, Doc, where we take almost all those numbers on the CEO dashboard, we plot them against the same quarter of the prior year, and then that tells us the trend. So that gives us a ton of information going in so we can look at it, say, Oh my gosh, we’re in trouble or profit margins going down our door count is going down where that now we know the opportunities we better focus on versus, oh, wow, this has been an amazing killer year and killer quarter. We’re doing great. Maybe we can take a little more risk in going after what we want to go after because we’ve got more margin. So that idea that Gwen mentioned there are like knowing where you start to race from that that’s imperative because if you don’t start from what’s the point of setting goals?
Gwenn Aspen
And so just a point of like what we actually do is we use a software. I don’t work for them, although I should because I love them so much. We use a software called ninety.io, and we have all of our metrics in that software, and is been a total game changer. And if you’re into iOS, it gives you agendas for your meetings and everything like that. So I’m a huge fan of that software. And so that’s where we keep the majority of our numbers. But I still do extra things and look at the numbers by the year for this specific strategic planning meeting. But that’s where we keep all of our KPIs.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that’s great. And you know, just to kind of tap into this a little bit more, you know, Mark, I’m curious if you could kind of speak because I feel like there’s people have different relationship ups, I’d say with like goals or some people are kind of like maybe there’s a spectrum of like how much you focus on goals and goal setting versus kind of like habits or routines or systems. And it’s not that you can’t have both, but, you know, people may fall on kind of like different parts of that spectrum. Curious like what your philosophy is, how you think about it and what kind of questions are you really answering in an annual or strategic versus like quarterly or, you know, a more ongoing basis?
Marc Cunningham
Yeah. And I thought and you’re right, I agree with you. I think it’s a spectrum right goals think that the extremely goal oriented person hey I’m going to run 17 marathons by January 23rd. You know that person versus the I’m going to just kind of roll that, see what happens. I’m not a huge goal guy. And when you guys ask me like, would you come on and talk about goals party or like, I don’t really set up. So I didn’t tell you that until now. So I don’t I don’t want to I don’t want to blow the price, but I’m more of the idea and of the mindset that if you put processes and systems in place, then you don’t need to focus on the big goal out there. They will get you to the goal. You know, what’s the quarter reading? Because I was forget it. You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems and that that’s my philosophy. So I can have big, great goals. But what am I going to do that day to get there? That’s where my systems and processes comes in. So for example, on our income side of things, we have a KPI, a measure of success. It’s kind of what we call it that we want to achieve 6% quarter over quarter net income growth, right? So every January, I don’t need to sit down and be like, what do we want to do this year? How much more money do we want to make this year? No, it’s 6% quarter over quarter. That’s the expectation. Now I need to figure out how to get us there, but I don’t need to come up with the goal. I don’t need to figure out how many doors we want to grow, how many owners we want to come up with. I just have to make sure that we’re doing the mechanics that get us there. And over time then that that’s in my view, that’s what becomes a snowball that just rolls on itself. And then you can look back and like, Wow, we’re getting there and we’re not even having to I want to try that, but we’re not having to reinvent everything. Well, no, because we put the processes and the systems in place to achieve that quarter after quarter after quarter and year after year after year. And I see you’re looking for it. Yeah. So Gwen kept Jeremy part. No, go ahead. Tell me tomorrow.
Gwenn Aspen
Well, no, you’re not wrong. They’re just different ways of doing things. I’m like, I love goals, guys. I’m, like, obsessed. I have a I have a journal. I go through one of these, like, once a month. I’m like, the ultimate nerd girl with my journal, writing my goals down. I like, Well, so here’s why the process I, I have a very specific way. I want my employees and my clients to feel which sounds really weird. So I’m focused on doing things that make them feel a specific way. So if I feel like my processes are equating to that feeling like we’re the company that’s going to just knock your socks off, then that kind of informs the goal in some ways. I mean, so that’s just one of the weird things about me, but I love the goals. I’m obsessed with seeing if I actually meet the goals or not. I’m overly optimistic. And so sometimes the goals are to dramatic and but I’ve gotten better at goal setting by reviewing really honestly, if we succeeded or failed. And I still struggle with being specific about a goal, I’ll give you an example. So I think every company is like, okay, we wrote our processes and procedures. Now we need a learning platform to put all these training videos on well, so I made the mistake learning platform. Was the goal Well, was it how many videos was that? Was that a video with a test? Is that a course work that equates to like a like a designation or a badge? What does that meet or does it mean just finding the software that we are going to have as a training platform? And because the goal lacks specificity, I failed at it. I couldn’t even win at it. It was such a bad goal. So the specificity and getting really clear on like if I make quarterly goals, if my record or I’m going out on a big vacation in the middle of the water, I’d have to take that into consideration. And what’s actually going to happen based on my personal life and what I want to accomplish at work. I also have to be very clear and concise about what the goal actually is, and then we have to look at last quarter’s goals and be unfailingly honest and who is really getting there and not getting there. And a lot of the time tremendous progress has been made. But the goal wasn’t clear enough. And so it’s still a fail because we have to be honest so that we can set better goals in the future.
Andrew Smallwood
You know, the direction I want to take this next is, I think, like talking to a number of property managers and business owners, even outside of property management. Like people have different frameworks of there’s like a must, a should a could, right. There are almost different targets, or hey, here’s our financial plan and budget. And then here is our, you know, a goal or something that’s a little more stretch, so to speak, and what gets communicated to the team. And I think in that I’ll bucket into this, there’s like a key question people often come up against of like, okay, am I hiring when it hurts? Right and running a little bit lean, right, so to speak, and handling things that way and making my decisions that way. It potentially restricting some growth but doing so prudently or am I making some investments in some forward kind of like leaning investments to, you know, these are kind of like key decisions I feel like people are often challenged with and I’ve often tried like different approaches at different times. And I think both of you come from a place of experience, of like having gone at it, you know, different ways. And if you could speak to your experience of tackling those kind of decisions and, and what you’ve learned from experience so far. Mark, if we could start with you.
Marc Cunningham
Yeah, philosophically and that’s a great question for me to answer, because this year for us is a I have a vastly different answer to that question than I would have had 12 months ago if we were sitting here. So for the history of our company forever, we’ve always operated with a very lean philosophy, right? So so if think of it this way, if you churn it out on a on a bar chart like your growth curve, right. Hopefully every year it’s up and to the right, you’re a little more girl. Gilmore Girl or more girl, A little more girl. And then if you chart it out, you’re like your capacity chart as well. You know, what’s the capacity? Are you built to manage 100 doors when you’re only managing 90 or then you have some excess capacity? Or are you built to manage 75 doors but you’re managing 100, right? So they’re going to hopefully be close. And we’ve always believed that we want our capacity to be under our current growth because it gives us a level of safety, right? So that if they are that big owner just fired us or COVID hit and you know, something crazy happens, we’re going to be okay because we’ve got that margin of safety. And so we’ve always operated forever, correct? Well, what happened this year is we’ve grown so fast that suddenly that margin between our doors manage and our capacity has gotten stretched further than we want it to be. And now we’re feeling some real stretches because now we’re like in 15, 20% beyond where we should be. Our capacity is way low, which from a from a strength of business and from a stability side. Great. Love it, by the way, that is the aura of light being coming from behind me there, the light on what’s going on. So this year, in January or actually last month, we decided we’re going to flip those growth charts because we’re starting to fall behind. So we’re actually we’re going to overstaffed, we’re going to hire more than we need now, a year ago said, no, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And you’re like, no, the be a bad business decision. Now, the reason I’m comfortable doing it is because we now have 18 months of growth trajectory, which is really solid. So I can point back and say, No, we’ve been doing this for 18 months. That trend is going to continue, number one. And even if it doesn’t continue, if it doesn’t work, we have the margin in our profits to be able to absorb it. So if it blows up and you ask me a year from now, Hey, how’d that work? Like, yeah, that was stupid. We shouldn’t hire those people. We’re going to be just fine because we have the margin and the capacity to offset that loss if it doesn’t work. So it’s a risk versus reward scenario for us. But but we’ve scaled and in my advice, the company was always don’t do that unless you have scale to the point that you can take a chance if you’re managing $50, don’t go higher up to assume you’re going to manage 350 because you’ve got to get your next 25, right? Well, we’re at 1200 doors, so if we don’t scale up, we’re going to be fine. But the bigger you get, I think the more risks you take that way. Just if you have the finances behind it.
Andrew Smallwood
It how do you think about this of like, hey, is there one target? And that’s what everyone’s focused on. Are there a couple of guardrails or strata? And how do you think about this investment, the time for investment, forward leaning versus lean? And hey, maybe we will prove ourselves, you know, as we go and add on as we go. How do you approach that and kind of lessons have you learned that could be useful for that?
Gwenn Aspen
So I do find it useful for the team dynamic. If there is a Northstar metric that everyone is working towards. So if it’s doors, if you’re growing, if it’s doors, or when we had with our group at the beginning, we took any piece of garbage that we could that had a roof on it and managed it because that was the game we were playing. And so as we grew, we wanted every time we got a nice property on, we would get rid of an old property. So the real Northstar metric was this bucket of properties we no longer want to manage. How many have we gotten off the list? Because that was what would really motivate people at the business. So that Northstar metric can be really helpful in terms of this question of do you hire before you have it or do you just stay really lean. This is really hard because this is what this is like the quintessential business question, right? Sales versus operation. And this is where people’s history, knowing the market, having good intuition, this is where it all comes in. Right? And so I think that it’s totally if you’re a risk taker, it’s okay to have big dreams, but you’re going to hang out if your big dream doesn’t work out. You just have to keep in mind that there are real people on your team who are going to be affected if your big dream ends and them getting fired and that that’s where that real responsibility is. So I tend to be more of a risk taker than maybe your average person. And so I’ve had to really feel super bad because it didn’t some of sometimes throughout my years of working, I made a mistake and I overshot. And the consequence was, you know, maybe somebody lost their job because they didn’t have the funds. Then my dream didn’t work out. So if you have the stomach for that, you know, you can think really big. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve got a little bit more responsible with those decisions. Maybe I’m just better understanding the market with time and business and making those mistakes and feeling the pain of screwing up. So I feel like, again, better guesser. But this is the real reason why business is so hard and challenging, why it’s not for the faint of heart.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And he at this point, I do want to draw your attention to the chat. If folks want to start. I see a bunch of I’m looking now and I see a bunch of like comments and things people are reflecting and they’re like in the different approach and different answers, There’s there’s more than one way to make a baby. I’ve always liked as a turn of phrase, more than like one way to skin a cat.
Marc Cunningham
Andrew, I don’t think that’s right. I’m pretty sure there’s just one way to make a baby. But I don’t want to really digress too far.
Andrew Smallwood
All right, that’s another panel for another time.
Marc Cunningham
Put me on that panel I have some opinions on that.
Gwenn Aspen
That goes on the cards of humanity or wait, what is it, cards of property management question.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that’s right. I love it. Yeah. Listen, there’s a lot of great stuff in the comments here. I’m going to pick one or two things out, but we’ll invite more questions here. You’re in the chat earlier in the panel you guys were talking about, you know, hey, it sounds like both of you have actually gone from either, say, a involve me in like inclusive a lot of people to Gwen. I think now it’s like a smaller group of maybe just two or three or four kind of like business partners that you’re evolving there. If there’s a small company of, you know, 10 to 12, maybe the way you know, we can ask about this is, you know, who might be involved in the planning process. Mark, it sounds like you may get input from a lot of people, but it’s really like a one on one meeting, so to speak, where you’re really kind of like assessing and reflecting it. Here’s what we’re going to communicate out as the company plan for the year. I’d love to hear from both of you. Like, okay, what’s the process for getting inputs or who might be involved in the meeting and then be what is communication afterwards look like of communicating what the output of that meeting is? And Gwen, let’s start with you on this one and then go to Mark.
Gwenn Aspen
So with who’s in the meeting, I really some people are so I’m extroverted. So is my, my husband’s extroverted so we get to conclusions through the act of talking. So that’s why collaborative process is important for us. And so I think it’s really if you’re an introvert, maybe that sounds like the worst idea ever and you should just have a meeting with yourself. And I, like Peter Lohman, says he goes on a three day solo. Maybe that’s a better option. So it just going to have to look at the dynamics of the people who are making decisions and what works best for them in terms of communication. After the meeting, we do a town hall where we go over wins and losses for the last year and then we give everybody the game plan. Now it is a little vulnerable giving that game plan because like I said, I’m a risk taker. So if my risky growth ideas don’t turn out, everybody knows that was a dream. And so it puts a little pressure on you to actually succeed at those dreams, too, because everybody wants to be on a winning team. And so but I do think it’s important a players really want to be on a team where they see the vision of the company and they understand their place and making that vision a reality. So I think it’s super important to put that vision out there and make sure everybody kind of knows what part they play in that.
Marc Cunningham
Yeah, so my comment and I see Jan’s question on there, you know, if you have 10 to 12 people, should you do all my recommendations? No. Will We had 10 to 12 people. Nobody in the company besides you as the business owner has the full picture. They just don’t. If you’ve got ten people, there’s nobody in there. You better know it, right? I mean, you better have a clear understanding of what’s going on in leasing and what’s the market doing and how are your finances and is your payroll strong and how is your it and what’s your website? You’re like, you’ve got to be look at all those things. What’s nobody else in your company either knows it or cares about it. Nobody else is waking up at 3 a.m. working. I’m worried about the finance. As a company, you’re the only one doing that, so I’m going to give them equal weight. No, of course not. If there’s one or two people that maybe I really value their opinion and I just trust them having a good sense and I trust their wisdom, then yeah, I’m going to ask them more. But that’s where you get to know your people as well. All right. So we’ve got 30 people, 28 people, whatever. I mean, I tried to I have lunch with every one of our people one time for you. That’s not a lot. But I mean, I see them regularly. But on those lunch meetings, that’s what I am. And ask this question every time. If you were me, what would you be doing differently if you were running this company today? What do you think? What would you change? What are the things we’re doing wrong? What are the opportunities we’re not taking advantage of? Like, I’m going to throw that out there to every single one of them during that lunch meeting. That’s going to give me a lot of give me a great starting point. So maybe I will go back to one of those people a few months later as I’m planning and say, hey, remember you suggested that we start marketing this way, but tell me more about that. You know, I’m going to tap the there are great resources. I’m going to tap them as resources, but not bring them in as a decision maker. So once I do that, I’m going to get all that information. Now, this is what I agree with 100%. At the end of the day, though, when we get that vision, we’ve got to go back and sell it to our people, because if I can’t convince them why this is a good thing for them and for the company, well then they’re going to be like, okay, well, here’s Mark’s new stupid idea for the month and we’ll give another month and see what he comes up with. So so when we had our we have a monthly all team meeting, so when we had our all team meeting the end of August, I rolled out our new plans for next year and I had it all diagramed out. I had, I had I actually had a PowerPoint. I was talking about the market, what are the opportunities are And we’re doing this, we’re doing that. Here’s the direction we’re going. I’m so excited for this. This is going to bring more stability. The company, it’s going to be more opportunities for you guys. It’s going to be I was rah, I’ve got to sell it is if I can’t do that, then it’s going to fall flat. And then they just look at it as more work to do.
Gwenn Aspen
Yeah. And for the 10 to 12 people, was that the question? I did that and it was a disaster. If people don’t say anything in the meeting, they shouldn’t be in it. So there are a lot of people like to sit back and I really think it’s only people who have an opinion and at the end of the day, that’s the it’s people, the people who should be making the decisions or whose decisions should have the most weight are the people who are financially invested in the profitability of the business, because they’re the ones who really have to make the tough decisions at the end of the day. And then we do keep people, key people, because there are other people whose opinions we care about. We have a kind of like that when a million what was that million dollar? What $1,000,000 show where you could call a friend. So we have them like ready. We’re having our strategic planning meeting and we’re probably going to need you to deliver some advice at one point or another. So they’re all on call if we have a question or we want some opinion on a specific issue.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, I love that. Hey, we’re going to get a couple more questions in here. Rapid Fire, before we close out with our survey and give away some cards against property managers with the expansion pack. We got a couple ideas for earlier. Let’s see. Mark Brewer, what is the difference between company vision and goals? I’ll toss that one up in the middle.
Marc Cunningham
I’ll take a stab at it. Yeah, for us, absolutely. I think there’s no correlation there at all from our perspective. So our company vision is going to relate almost more to our culture. That’s how we would really frame that. So we’ve got it. We’ve got some behavioral values that we pound on and some philosophies of property management that relates to kind of the vision of our company, the direction we’re going, which is more touchy feely. It’s improving lives. That’s the business world. It’s improving the lives of our team members. It’s approving the lives of our tenants. So yesterday at our team meeting, we told all of our people, Hey, you know, why pick a tenant that you know that’s in need and call them up and tell them we’re giving them a Thanksgiving present or 200 bucks. They’re going to lower rent credit. Everybody pick a tenant in need. That. That’s the vision, right? Is that a goal? No, that moves my metrics backwards. I’m making less money because of that. Has nothing to do with that. That’s more of who we are, how we help people, the direction we’re going. I think for us, those two things are diametrically opposed at times and this is a great example of that because if my goal is to increase my profit margin, you be like, Well, Mark, that was stupid. You just lost the company a bunch of money. Yes, I did, because I got to feed both those. I got to feed the vision and I also got to feed the goal. So that that’s our view.
Gwenn Aspen
That I don’t think I can improve upon that. That was also Mark. I would just say that the goals are very blocking and tackling. We divide them up into quarterly goals and it’s the how you’re going to accomplish bigger, a bigger objective over the year. And then back to mark touchy feely vision.
Marc Cunningham
Yeah yeah. And I would even double down on that to say your team members, your employees, they don’t care about your goals They don’t care how many doors you manage. They don’t care your profit margins. They don’t know that’s you. That’s us as business owners, what do they care about? Well, you know what? When I said call the tenant and give them 200 bucks, like you said, I’ve heard the chatter in the office that that’s what everybody thought. Would you call this? Oh, they cried when I call them that. No, I’m not trying to minimize the importance, but like that was that’s a big deal for them, right. Because that’s the company vision. That’s the company culture, that that’s what they get out of this. They don’t care about my metric goals don’t care about our door count. They care about their life every day coming in the office, how it impacts them, what the company does for them and their camaraderie with each other. We went out to lunch yesterday. Our whole team took them all out to lunch for hour prefects giving lunch and it was expensive. Why don’t why? What goal was that? That’s culture. That’s vision.
Andrew Smallwood
I love that. Hey, we’re going to squeeze this one in quick. I think it’s a great way to close. I’ve got a question from Debbie. If you could go back in time to your first years, you know, in the property manager business, what’s the best advice you would give yourself then if you could win the clock back and Marc, why don’t we start with you and then when you can bring us.
Marc Cunningham
Be careful of what older clients you bring on. Some of the best decisions we’ve made are the owner clients. We’ve decided not to work with. So you can you will grow smaller, you will grow slower if you adopt that philosophy, but you will grow from place of strength and you won’t wake up one morning with a bunch of older clients that drive me crazy. So just be cautious and have criteria for selecting older clients.
Gwenn Aspen
I would say you get what you tolerate, so as your business grows, you’ll tolerate less or fewer things will be tolerable. And so that’s an interesting process. But if I had known that at the beginning, that would be very helpful. Additionally The book Traction. I wish I had read that. That’s by Gina Wegman. I wish I had read that my very first day starting my very first business because that has really impacted our ability to meet our goals and plan effectively.
Andrew Smallwood
Awesome. All right. We got a shout out for EOS at the end there. Gwen, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Mark Thank you so much. Thanks to both of you. Again. It’s just great to hear people who have experienced, measured in decades and you know, and wisdom by the pound here. So really appreciate you guys sharing so generously.
Laura Mac & Carol Housel
And that wraps up another episode of the Triple-Win Property Management podcast. Thank you for pressing play. We hope you've gained valuable insights and inspiration.
The Triple-Win Property Management Podcast is proudly produced and distributed by Second Nature, where we believe in a Triple-Win, building winning experiences for your residents, investors and your teams with the only fully managed resident benefits package. Visit SecondNature.com to learn more and talk to an RBP expert in your area. If you have any questions, comments or want to weigh in on the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Email TripleWin@SecondNature.com. That's TripleWin@SecondNature.com. Stay connected with us beyond the podcast. Visit our website at SecondNature.com to stay updated with upcoming property management events and articles. And don't forget, you can keep the conversation going in the Triple-Win Property Management Facebook group. It's exclusively for property managers. To receive even more valuable insights and updates, subscribe to our newsletter. You can find the link to that and much more in the show notes. On behalf of the Triple-Win community, this is Laura Mac, thanking you for tunin in. And on behalf of Second Nature, this is Carol Housel. Check back soon for another exciting episode. Until then, keep striving for that Triple-Win.