What is the 20% of what you do that creates 80% of your value?
So much of our time is focused on process and activity, but what is the right process what is the right activity to be focused on that creates value and ultimately drive profit? This episode focuses on connecting day-to-day processes, value creation and bottom line financial performance to give you a clearer understanding of how you can operationalize profit in your property management business.
This episode originally appeared as part 2 of the Operationalizing Profit Series: Architecting Experience hosted by Daniel Craig of ProfitCoach and features Thad Tarkington, Adam Willis, and Wolfgang Croskey. To learn more about how ProfitCoach can help your PMC identify the key profit drivers in your business, visit their website.
Questions or thoughts on the topics we covered? Send us an email.
Join our private Facebook group - only for professional property managers.
Follow the Triple Win Property Management podcast by Second Nature and never miss an episode!
Season 3 Episode 18 features Daniel Craig, Thad Tarkington, Adam Willis, and Wolfgang Croskey
The Triple Win Property Management Podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature
Episode Transcript:
Daniel Craig
The average PM is missing out on $185,000 of profit every year. We want to understand why is that the case? And I believe that the answer to that question really comes back to understanding what is the 20% of what you do that creates 80% of your value.
Andrew Smallwood
Hello professional property managers. Andrew Smallwood here with the Triple Win podcast, we've got a special replay today from an exclusive session run by Adam Willis of Nestwell Property Management out in Utah, Wolfgang Croskey out of California, and our very own Thad Tarkington, moderated by Daniel Craig from ProfitCoach. So these guys got together and you're going to hear them ask and answer questions like what are some of the metrics and KPIs used to measure a great experience? What are some of the opportunities from move-in an initial onboarding throughout some of the highs and lows, emotional events throughout the investor and resident lifecycle? How can we expand the lifetime value of these relationships by creating great experiences? And what are some of the best practices to do. So you've got an action packed, lengthy recording going deep across just how to build winning experiences for residents, investors and ultimately drive a great win for your bottom line. So we hope you enjoy and we'd love to hear your feedback.
Daniel Craig
Welcome back to the Operationalizing Prophet Webinar series. So glad to have you joining us today. It's going to be a great day and we're really thankful that you take some time out of your busy schedule to join myself, Adam Wallace, Wolfgang Prosky and Bad Tarkington. We are here to talk about operationalizing Prophet, efficiency, growth experience Prophet. Last week we talked about architecting labor efficiency. Today we are talking about architecting experience, how to leverage the operational drivers of owner and resident experience plus profit. Next week we'll be talking about architecting growth. But so glad to have you joining us here live today. And we got a lot of things in the House planned for today. I always do this, guys. I always forget to change the chat settings, too. Everybody can chat with everyone. So. All right, I just done that. Where are you tuning in from? Go ahead and jump in to chat and tell us where you're tuning in from Tampa, Sunny San Diego. Danielle, thanks for making us jealous. And then the question I want to throw out there today is what's one thing that you love about property management? Okay. I don't know that I've ever asked that here in this webinar series before. What's one thing you love about property management to get a little gratitude going as well? We are privileged to have some great panelists in the house today. Thad Tarkington from Second Nature that thanks for joining and Adam Willis from Nestwell. Thank you, Adam, for being here and sharing your experience with the industry and Wolfgang Croskey with Croskey Real Estate. Wolf, appreciate you being here as well. Some things we've got coming into chat. Never a dull moment. I love that. That's like the best way to say what you love about property management. Never a dull moment. New problems to solve. I love the long term relationships with my clients. Michael Francis The people making lives better, giving our clients amazing investment experience and our residents an amazing quality home to live in. Thank you for the positive outlook there, Michael. I appreciate that very much. My name's Daniel Craig. You know me, I'm the author of the New Accounting Standard CEO here at Profit Coach. And we help property managers expand their highly their entrepreneurial freedom by building highly profitable self-managing companies. And as I've said before, the thing that I'm even more thankful than all that is be a dad to these kiddos and husband to Megan. God has given me many blessings and I'm thankful for all the blessings that we experience every day in our lives from God. All right. Questions. If you have them dropped in the Q&A box, that's where we'll be answering questions as we go along here. It's hard to keep on top of questions if you're putting them in chat, so be sure and drop them in the Q&A box. As always, we are here to facilitate transformation in mindset and thinking to help you go from financial fog to financial clarity, from gut based decision making to predictable forecasting, and ultimately from mediocrity to benchmark success are you guys ready to talk about architecting experience, going to get a little energy in the house from the panelists? Somebody just you know, you can be very proud that you are all right. How to leverage operational drivers of owner and resident experience plus profit architecting experience. I want to set up a poll to get this conversation kicked off today because I want to come at the experience from a very specific, measurable approach today. There's a lot of talk about experience, and that's good because it's very important. But what do we mean by it? And specifically, how do we measure it? We're going to throw up a poll in just a moment, but the context for this series and for this episode is the financial benchmark study that we did last year. And looking at the fact that when it comes to profitability, the average in the industry is 11%. The top 25% of performers are doing 32% profitability. And we ran the numbers to understand what the average company is losing out on in terms of profit as a result of the gap that you see there on the screen. And the average PM is missing out on $185,000 of profit every year. We want to understand why is that the case? And I believe that the answer to that question really comes back to understanding what is the 20% of what you do that creates 80% of your value. So much of our time is focused on process and activity, but what is the right process? What is the right activity we're focused on that creates value and ultimately drives profit in your business. Too many PMS operate without a real time connection between day to day processes, value creation and bottom line financial performance. And that's the connection that we're trying to forge in this webinar series by looking at profit in terms of four aspects of the day to day of your business process, execution, experience and growth. We're trying to operationalize profit and profit thinking in those four areas. Today. We are focused on experience with these fine panelists and let's dive in with that poll. How do you know if you are generating a high value experience? I want to go ahead, launch the poll here. How do you know if you're providing a high value experience, go ahead and select the answer that you think is the most important indicator revenue per unit. In other words, if you are charging a lot and people are willing to pay a lot, then you're obviously providing high value unit churn, Google or Yelp ratings. Resident Lifetime home profitability, organic unit growth, organic referrals, satisfaction scoring or surveys or something else. Go ahead and throw in your response to that question while you're answering. I want to tell you a story. It's Adam's story, but I'm the guy that makes Adam's dashboard. So I had the story to tell with Adam's numbers today. And as I was thinking about preparing for this webinar series and answering this question, how do you know if you're providing a high value experience? I think that there's three things I observed about ness. Well, over the last three years, three trends that help us answer this question. Number one is growth. Here's a look at Nestle's growth over the last three years from about 400 to about just under a thousand units today with two small acquisitions right here in right here. But tons of organic growth in the process. And so when you look at the value that Nestle is providing, the first thing we see is that people are coming, people are coming to nest. Well, number two, when we look at Nestle's churn charts over the same time period, you see a net decrease back here in about three years ago, we were at about 15%. Then we hit the hot real estate sales cycle. I think, Adam, you lost a multifamily portfolio or something right in here. And then that cleared out of the system and now we're right at the benchmark in our benchmark at about 10% churn. So the second thing we see is that people are staying and then the last question as well, is Nestle making any money? And I'm not going to tell you how much money they're making, but here's a look at the profitability charts for over three years, over the same three years, they've gone from roughly about 12% profitability to about 27% profitability today, which means that they're profitable. So I'm going to throw this out to you as the answer to the question, how do you know if you're providing a high value experience? And panelists, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this. But the premise I want to throw out and you guys can pick this apart is the idea that organic growth plus retention plus profitability equals a high value experience, or at least that's one way to know, because if you have growth without retention, that could just mean you're good at sales marketing. If you have growth and retention without profit, that could just mean you're cheap. But if you have growth and retention in profit, it means you're providing real value that people are coming for and staying for. I'm going to open it up, Wolf, and that probably are more objective than Adam on this one. Thoughts?
Wolfgang Croskey
So I can say for a long time we were bullet number two, like, yeah, we're growing. We weren't having any churn. Life was great. But then you start looking at your numbers and like, maybe life's not as great as we thought, right? Because you're still stuck on number of doors, number of doors. How many doors do we have in the company doing real estate sales and looking at the whole thing, but realizing on the PM side it wasn't it wasn't as profitable and we need to make a change. So I definitely agree with number three growth, retention and profit as a indicators.
Daniel Craig
That I'd love to hear your thoughts. And by the way, I just threw up the results of the poll. 26% of people think that unit churn is the best, most important indicator of experience based on what I put on the screen anyways. And the next one is organic referrals. Thoughts on all three of us?
Thad Tarkington
Yeah, I would agree. I like the focus on churn and referrals because at the end of the day I think if people are leaving you or they refer you, it's got two different sides of the same coin here, which is are people happy with the service, happy with the experience? And yeah, I think like in any business, finding what really drives and good experience that there's probably a handful of things that really impact people. And I will probably talk about this later. But on thinking about a resident or an investor owner, you know, what's that first impression you leave with them? So starting your sales process, you know, do you come off professional? You know, that really sets that bar and then you go from there. Obviously, you can grow trust, build trust, or you can lose trust. But that's one area I highlight, I think.
Daniel Craig
So I love that. And that speaks specifically to the question of what is the 80% to 20% of what you do that drives 80% of the value. We're going to dig specifically into that great lead into that about and this is your story that I just told for about a minute. Any any feedback on this, especially having walked this journey?
Adam Willis
Yeah I have a poster above my camera here and it's people product and profit. And if you have an amazing people experience and your product solving concerns for your customers, the profits will follow the post the right next to everything we do. We ask how to provide value so every decision we make and directly correlated to what the experience for the customer out of the impact our product and the better it is, the more we can charge.
Daniel Craig
Awesome. Okay, well, let's dive into the meat and potatoes for today. We're going to be talking about experience fundamentals. We're going to be talking about measuring and improving experience inputs and then measuring and improving experience outputs. Folks are going to go about 15 minutes past the top of the hour. So we're going to run for about an hour and 15 today on another hour from now. So it's going to be awesome. Hang with us as long as you can experience fundamentals. This is really what I was just alluding to. But I want to give you some specific things to kind of hang your hat on in terms of growth, retention and profitability. And these are numbers that I would encourage you to measure. And in relationship to the corporate accounting standards, as I will just throw up a little bit of a sampling of that data, the national average for churn is 20%, whereas the top 25% of companies with the lowest churn are right around 10%. And by the way, this is based off of 21 2021 data, which was very much still in the hot sales market. And even in that time, companies were still maintaining fairly low churn at 10%. When it comes to profitability, again, we've talked about this, the average is 11%. The benchmarks 32%. Next week I'm going to be bringing data on what the fastest growth companies do in terms of adding new doors that you can sort of benchmark yourself in terms of the door ad side of the equation. But these are some experience fundamentals. But I think the big question for a lot of us is what's underneath the surface of these experience fundamentals. What like that was saying are the first impressions significant experience or like Adam was saying the things that we do that really drive value, that's what we're going to start talking about in terms of onboarding, in terms of maintenance, in terms of communications and some other areas of your business. But before we dive into that, we are really thankful for partners for this webinar series that have made this possible, and they banded together to put together this operationalize using profit resource bundle. And it's in four different resources. First of all, it's an expanded of not available to the public resident Experience report from Second Nature, a set of benchmarks for world class maintenance operations and experience from property. Now double your DMS output system from red scale and then ten workflows to increase your profitability through systems, plus a bonus hiring process to reduce time to hire as used by elite simple team. So if you would get some value, add any one of those resources, just say yes, I want that and we'll have our partners send those to you. If you already said yes last week, you're already on the list, but want to make these resources available to you again. Let's talk a little bit about measuring and improving experience inputs. And and the question that I want to ask here is what are the key events in the owner and resident lifecycle that you have to get right? In other words, what is the 20% of what you do that creates 80% of your value? And I've already talked to Adam, Wolfgang and Thad offline about this, so I'm not going to have you guys answer this question. We're just going to dive right in. First of all, we're going to talk about owner onboarding, best practice is And Wolf, I'm going to just have you talk a little bit about your journey with this, some of the metrics that you're currently looking at and tracking. One of the things that came up in the webinar last week that I just put up here was something from Brad, and that is the amount of time between the onboarding to the basically getting that unit or that owner handed off to their ongoing property manager and POD. So that's what that number is about. But what are some things you've been tracking related to onboarding experience and some best practices around that?
Wolfgang Croskey
Yeah. So I think first off, a lot of times people say, Oh, well, you know, all this automation, all this tech, you probably have dashboards that are just pages and pages. And the reality is I don't dashboards are definitely not one of my strong points. They're trying to get better at that. So we use 90 IO and our scorecard in there and what we are tracking as far as that owner experience is the number of emails calls that are coming in those first 30 days. Because for us it's an indicator of, well, how is our onboarding experience going in general? Like are they reading the emails are maybe the wording is not clear, maybe we can change up our messaging. And one thing that we found is people don't read. So we're changing our onboarding experience to be more video based and actually scheduling old school phone calls and using that to improve that experience because our onboarding wasn't super automated because we wanted kind of that high touch feel, but it still relied upon emails at different sequences when we thought, okay, they're probably now going to get their first owner distribution. So let's explain that process and all those things that were covered during the sales process and the initial onboarding. But we wanted to, you know, do it again. But the issue is we're finding I think people just don't rate. So even when we tried to spice things up with the chatbot email and emojis and all that, it's still just not working. So we're going to actually do scheduled phone calls and change in some emails to actually be videos to help with that based on the data that we're getting. I see somebody asking about what software we're using, the track emails and phone calls. I'll let you know. It is a little bit on the manual side. So we use Zoom for our phone service. We're using RingCentral, but when you can cut your phone bill by half, you make the switch. So we're using Zoom and you can, you know, export your call log. You can sort by caller ID and different things. But it is it is a little bit on the manual process. On the email side, we have in our owner onboarding process and lead simple a simple question of you know, how many emails were sent in and lead simple in the inbox. We can see exactly how many emails came in from that owner, and then we just put that number. So it's not an automated just the number shows up in the scorecard. And we know and I wouldn't say that our numbers are 100% accurate either, but at least we can see the trend. And the other question that we look at is, okay, for those that did call or email, what did they call or email about? And using that as a way to enhance that onboarding with that. So that's I think for owners specifically, that's what we track for tenants. We look at number of work orders submitted in the first 30 days that the snow did we have a good turn? Did we catch everything we're supposed to? You know, it was a turnkey like we promised. And also we get those tenants that they submit a non-work related service request. How do I do? Fill in the blank and using that to improve the onboarding experience?
Daniel Craig
It's awesome. Really dive a little bit more into the resident side of things a little bit more as well. But Adam, when we talked prior to this webinar, you shared some really fantastic things just in terms of what the sequence or best practices that you guys have surface in terms of creating value in this high value moment. I'd love to have you unpack that and just tell us a little bit about like what is the overall process and some key things that you find make the process sparkle.
Adam Willis
For owner onboarding or resident?
Daniel Craig
Owner onboarding.
Adam Willis
Yeah. The overarching theme is being able to anticipate the need, right? So addressing the question before it even comes. So when things like, Hey, how many emails that we received for the client, we want to proactively address the need before they even know they have a right and that part of that ease of doing business. So our owner onboarding from the second the deal is closed, we have an owner onboarding that, that their full time gig and there is a 90 day process broken down to six different pages that we are engaging with the homeowner and saying this is what you need to do. And it starts from like a welcome call, welcome email and saying, Let's schedule your onboarding, let's get together, I'm going to walk you through and make it as easy as possible. And there's major components that happen, right? Like the you immediately someone who signed with you, the big contract, they're trusting you with the half million dollar house or whatever, and then you go to them for 12 hours. They immediately have buyer's remorse. What am I done? I haven't heard from anyone. And these are all the feeling they're going to experience the buyer's remorse really quickly, get in contact with them, schedule the call. We paint a picture. Hey, this is the 90 day profit. That's when you're going to get your first thunder drop. Let's go through the utility schedule. Let's talk about when we're going to communicate. When your property is ready. And so the round that we're going to be talking about, let's say when the property is vacant, how many leads we received? What's the impression that we've received from like inquiries on the property, What the feedback smell funny and we're engaging them once a week in that regard. And we have kind of a like your properties on the market here. The lead here is the application here qualified lead, and here's the lease signing here in and it's a huge hub or spoke of lots of people talking to my owner but what who then conveys the message to the homeowner saying this is what we're doing, this is how we're providing value.
Daniel Craig
That's awesome. And one of the things that you mentioned to me, Adam, is and Morphew alluded to this as well, is personalized videos in the onboarding process. When I was expecting you to say I was, yeah. And we have all of these prerecorded videos that explain their statement and when the first owner job will be and how to use their portal. But then you're like, no, they're, they're personalized. Yes.
Wolfgang Croskey
Yeah. So I mean, we did do that for us in our emails. We would have some canned here's how to log in to your portal, etc.. When we look at the data like people didn't watch it. So yeah, whether you use like bom or loom to do the animated thumbnail with their name, whatever it takes to get them, but it really, if you think about the time it takes to write an email or the time it takes to have a phone call, let's just say phone call, 3 minutes. What type of personalized video could you record in the same amount of time? Send it to them. It's personalized. It makes it easier. You can make it systematic, You can record it whenever and send it whenever. So I mean, I think there's it's a good blend of automation with personalization.
Daniel Craig
Awesome that you honestly alluded to this kind of in your opening comments but anything you want to just throw into the owner onboarding best practice conversation and also resident will start pivoting to resident Yeah.
Thad Tarkington
Yeah. So a couple things I heard that I would, I would highlight is it's not as much about what you're saying or what you're sharing, it's what they're hearing. And that is one thing I love about, you know, phone call and you know, obviously there's things and still not recommending that like now carte blanche. But I you know, if you get on the phone, you're talking you know, they're here. You know, they're taking in that information. And, you know, ultimately what I look at like the investor side of this equation, if you remove highly emotional events, they will probably stay with you forever and make them look right. Like, if those two things are happening, then, you know, no spikes in their in their emotions or their cash flow or, you know, whatever is coming in, they'll be happy. And so like so much of what I look at is are in Adamy. Now there's like when someone signs on, it's like, you know, if the onboarding experience is great, suddenly they have buyer's remorse. But it is you think about like and you know, the life cycle of an investor every time you have to reach out to them of bad news and need approval and to make or this didn't go as planned. If you track all those and start to inventory them and say, okay, what are all of these things, just know, you know, do you think about like, you know, I'll use that trust bucket, but it's like your satisfaction bucket. Every time one of those happens, you lose a little bit, right? And it, it's really hard to give them something good in there because they're expecting you to perform well and they're expecting to make money, right? They hired you to not be involved. And so, you know, I think that's where I'd start is what are all those touch points? How do we get ahead of them? You know, it's absolutely you know, preemptively solve these things. And then, you know, there different operations products, services that can smooth out those emotional. That's yeah I think if you're doing all that then it's how do you be proactive and say okay I we actually have a call to talk about what's going well, how do we share information? And so but that would be kind of my key highlight is through all of those touchpoints and like art, is every touchpoint in strengthening the relationship or is it working in it? And what I see so often is, you know, it's a very reactive industry, but it's yes, the only conversation points are negative. And that's the, you know, the impression that people will build.
Daniel Craig
So that's great stuff that, that and one of the things I took away from what you said is the whole idea of like even collecting data on what are those common interaction points or those negative experiences that are occurring now and then what can we do proactively to remove those from ever occurring? So the point there is tracking the communication across all of your clients and finding what those themes are and then addressing those. One of the things that I want to do is talk a little bit about resident onboarding. And Adam, you shared something with me that was just kind of like, Hey, is it that just seems so expensive like template you guys do that with your residents, but talk a little bit about what the resident onboarding process looks like for you guys.
Adam Willis
Yeah, Resident Onboarding, it begins with having stellar showing people who are meeting people at the property, showing them in person, turning a low light, turning on the heat all the way through. We then meet them when they've gone through the qualification process and we're getting five star reviews. Online application process is absolutely dialed in. We had team working 12 hour day to get that pitch qualified and communicating with them and proactively getting document. Here's where it gets really expensive for me is we meet the people at the property, we video the whole home. The heck, we documented everything for you. You're welcome to do your own documentation. Let me take you on a tour of your new house where you're going to be bringing your first born child home to right? So it we walk them through the property. We educate them on where the water shutoffs are, where how to run the sprinkler system. We say, hey, look, it looks like something is wrong. And that's like a so we have a property condition quorum. We kind of put notes on it form thing that the time to fill that out. But at the much I in-person interaction with them to make sure that they're having a fantastic experience that they're moving into their brand new home. So we always say, Hey, welcome home. We have gift bags that are getting more and more robust with lots of necessities that they need for their first night, their first week staying there. And we just really want you like an ounce of prevention and a pound of cure. And so we rode that buttload, that relationship through meeting them at the property and doing everything under the men to really take care of them and making sure they really don't want per much. Now, it's not perfect, but we're aspirationally trying for that and it garnishes a ton of goodwill and we're not getting call think, Hey, I'm a flood, what do I do they know because we've educated them how to shut off the water. So it's a very expensive labor intensive thing to move all of these people. And every Friday and Saturday is when we do our event. But it pays huge dividends on the back end.
Daniel Craig
What are some of the implications of that, too, like the ongoing relationship with the client around things like inspections?
Adam Willis
Yeah, so after that same person who does the move and who showed them the how moved them and we go and we walk all over how this quarterly and so that same person is now showing up. Oh, hey, it's Katie. She's she's from Metro. She's coming to walk my out with me and just check on everything and see if they leave compliance issues, maintenance issues or whatever. So we're walking that home with that. So usually that the math, the point of contention where most property managers have just laid away and be like, here's an app, just go add it to your on its back. Then we're like, No, we're coming here. We're building relationship. And the byproduct of that is a lot of the pregnant are staying longer, but the tenancy is way longer or they're buying houses from them or they're baking cookies. Most show up. Hey, record that back then I'm going out and they're like giving it straight. Then we're like breaking bread with our resident now.
Daniel Craig
That's awesome. Why do you turn the inspection from this? Like, Well, they're coming to spy on me too. Like, my friends are coming over for cookies. That is truly, really great. Wolf You mentioned a little bit about the work orders in the first 30 days. Can you unpack that one a little bit more? Why is that important in terms of resident onboarding and anything else you guys are doing on the resident onboarding practices?
Wolfgang Croskey
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's you think about the last time you moved, right? You got the stress of packing up all your crap, sorting all your crap, saying goodbye to neighbors, changing your kids school, changing you is like this long list of things that we don't think about on the PM side because we don't have to deal with it, right? Like maybe we own our house, we haven't moved in 20 years, whatever, and we forget. And so you have a tenant who's going through this whirlwind of life changing events in steps, and you're going to ask them to read this really long email with all these details that define their day code. Give me a break. They're not going to do it. They may not even have Internet hooked up yet. Right. So sending this long email with all these things are supposed to do and then harassing them because they didn't turn in this stupid form within three days, that's important to you. And they're like, Screw you, I got more. I got to get my kid in school. Like, that's my priority right now. And then you add on top of it, the one toilet doesn't flush. We just moved in or the icemaker is not working. Or the carpet I thought was getting changed in the bedrooms. Not. And you know, so it just really compounds in. So now they're stressed and now they're pissed. And that's like the worst combination ever. And so what we found is if we can make it, I can't help them with their school registration. I can help them with a lot of things. But if I can make it where when they move in, it truly is turnkey. There's nothing else they have to do. Everything we promised is done. Everything's working. It just makes things a lot easier for everybody and what we're noticing and I'm trying to get real data because right now it's just anecdotal that rest of that lease in that lifespan with that resident is a lot better based on that first 30 days. Like that really kind of sets the tone of, oh, they're just another management company, They promise stuff and it never gets done right. And you swear if they move in and it's just rock solid, it just makes the world different. So we're using that because we try to how can we measure that first 30 day experience? And as a company, we felt, you know, work orders is the way to do it. It's it's easy to get that data out of AppFolio It doesn't take a data engineer to give us that number. Any one of us can access it. And we felt that we could really control that, that outcome. So and that's what we're doing right now are all of our move ins stellar? Now we we've dropped the ball on a couple, but at least we know what number we're going to use, how we're going to get there. And our goal is zero and also then helps us to pick better owners because we know that at the end of the day, if an owner is not willing to do certain things, that's going to come back on us. Right? The owner doesn't get the bad Yelp review. We do. So if we have an owner that's not going to get the property to the condition we want, do we really want to work with them? So it's really been helping us a lot.
Daniel Craig
So that's awesome that I know you guys have done a lot of research and work on resident experience. What are some things that you guys have found to be particularly important in the initial leasing process specifically and in resident onboarding process upfront?
Thad Tarkington
Yeah. So I would say what I think about resident onboarding one, one thing that's true is there's a million cases, you know, and if you try and say everything's going to be the same or you know, everyone will operate the same and we're going run in the same scenarios, like that's just not going to be true. And so the, you know, something that we've been working on heavily at Second Nature is really this kind of resident onboarding and kind of enrollment tool is the idea when you're moving into a new property. A resident may have never owned a home or lived in a single family home either, where they're responsible birds out of maintenance items responsible for the lawn. There's this thing they haven't ever even thought of, and it seems obvious to us. But like you'll move in a month later, The lawns ever grow new. Like what do I do right? And so, you know, the way we think about this is because you have so many cases. How do you kind of create these closed loop systems in a accountability for the items that really matter to the property and to the property owner? And, you know, so this tool, what we're building, what it does is effectively the resident goes through and it takes all their responsibilities from the lease, something that people often read. It brings it up into easy to digest. Yeah, bite sized pieces, just explaining, you know, if it's a multi year out parking space, you know, do you want to add parking? Right. That's a selection you can make right there. You know, removing that, that depends on your lawn. This is what your responsibility is built on Me. Do you want to do it yourself or do you want to, you know, have a vendor do it for you? Right. And so it's kind of this whole configuration and tool and effectively, you know, we just went live with this recently. But effectively what it does is it digitizes that entire rollout process in small bite sized pieces where you can see is each stage complete and then it's paired with these closed loop system redesign. So one example I'll give you is, is renters insurance just an easy one. You know, if you kind of rewind five years, ten years, everybody's saying, hey, you have to have renters insurance. Here's why. The challenge people would have is somebody moves in. They were told to buy a policy. You know, what's going to your point? It was probably in a 30 page letter. They didn't buy it then got four kids screaming at an a movie van. And the last thing you're going to do is say, hey, no call State Farm and I'll give you your key. Right? It's a send it to me. That's all right. Do you think about the incentives? The leasing agents are not incentivized to follow up. Property managers are busy, right? You have all these moving parts. And so that's where if you don't have a closed system, which you ended up with, a majority of residents were uninsured. And then the downside of that is you have a kitchen fire and it's a real big mess. And so the classic system design there is, okay, well, you have to be on a policy of some sort. So in the lease language, you're going to say, you know, resident, you're responsible to have insurance. If you do nothing, you'll be on this policy. Do you own a shop or a policy? You can do a here. If you have your own policy, you can upload it here and then on the back end, if they upload one, you know, very near, they're covered in the event that for any reason expires they get auto re-enrolled. Right. And so that's one example there you could say the same thing for like lawn service for example. You know this is the standard you have to maintain it too. You can do it yourself. Here's the cost. If you get a lot more education, you know, and so start to think through kind of that onboarding, he said, Here's all your responsibilities. And we designed a closed loop system that solves this. And then it's about giving that resident choice accountability, transparency, choose how you want to solve the problem. But there's an accountability mechanism. And I think, you know, if you look at any business problem, often, you know, there's a lacking incentive to solve it. So I saw some jokes in the in the chat here about maybe I should make a test. You know, they're out he's able to take the test, right? Like if you keep adding more stuff. But, you know, you know, how do you get people to really digest information and how do you design a fail safe? No, no. Well, I think it's really important in a resident onboarding process.
Daniel Craig
So that's great stuff that just so we're all clear. What do you mean specifically by a closed loop system?
Thad Tarkington
Yeah. Is it So the example would be, you know, using a renters insurance, it's, it's you know, you can add your own policy or you're on this policy and it's got your iris e popular and is in the event you know if you were by own you can upload it so it's like no matter there's no escaping proper outcome right. So that's what I mean by, you know closely there's just that there's a solution design for every edge case. So you have to capture and make sure that some things take care.
Daniel Craig
Of was great. Thank you, Thad. When it comes to the next big area that we want to talk about here, let's go to maintenance Best. And Wolf, you touched on these a little bit, but on the last webinar, we talked a little bit about speed of repair as just a basic metric of experience. Turn time target, less than 15 days. Also the number of touches per ticket and any additional thoughts you'd have on that, Wolf, as it relates to maintenance metrics that you're tracking and trying to improve.
Wolfgang Croskey
Time to get the work order assigned. I think a lot of a lot of tenants, labor shortage, you know, does different things with this one. No, it's just not sitting on some of these desk sitting there like it's being worked on. So as soon as they can see that it's been assigned to a vendor, it's a big stress reducer. So that's one that I would add to this list. I mean, maintenance, you could there's like millions of metrics you could get into. But as far as the around the experience and what was important for a resident, it's how quickly existing moving along and how quickly can we get somebody to the house to fix this problem. Because to us, the microwave not working. I'm sharing this because this is a recent story in our office that we could do a whole webinar on the five star review around a microwave that my mom swapped out. Anyways, the that was a big deal. This microwave, you know, they still had cooktop and all this is a big deal. But for offices like to microwave, you still have your cooktop, you know, it's not a top priority and we have to, I think, put ourselves in a person's shoes right. Every work order that's submitted is an emergency to that tenant. We have to somehow get it done. And for us, we have different criteria. But for them at that point in their day, that is an emergency for whatever reason and it's top priority. You know, not having hot water runs the rest of your day. You know, all these different things. How can we use data to help speed up work orders? Because, you know, it's an emergency to us. It's an emergency to our and it's one of the top reasons why residents move is around how maintenance is handled. So maintenance and communication are the top two that we really focus on, both on owner and resident, but the speed in which work orders are dealt with and then completed is huge for residents and by callbacks to like. Did it actually get fixed the first time around? Having to rearrange your work schedule because the vendor didn't do it right the first time and now they've got to come back a second time. Is this a big one that.
Daniel Craig
Adam, anything you would add on to the maintenance discussion here?
Thad Tarkington
Yeah, I can and go. Adam, or you go ahead.
Adam Willis
Please go ahead.
Thad Tarkington
So I'll highlight one of the, one of the most recent products we got, we brought onto our platform was on demand pest control partner pressure on that. And you know what I think about pest control like these this an example I was talking about highly emotional events earlier. And so if you look at, you know, your typical property and say, let's say you have a basket of 100 properties and hypothetically, let's say ten have a pest issue every year, you know, right now that's not something that's budgeted for, right? So the resident makes a complaint. Their expectation is you're going to solve this, right? They probably, again, didn't bring the least with the responsibilities. So their expectation is just whatever they came up with in their mind. The problem then is when you go to the owner and say, Hey, you need to pay for this. Yeah. And you just create an emotional that I learned there five years that radical. Why is this my fault? You know? And then no matter where it lands, you've got three people yourself or the property manager, you know, the resident investor. You know what's a little bit of friction? And everybody's having a bad day, right? And so I think, you know, you look at, you know, out of this segment, how do you prevent it to stop? So maybe like, you know, a solution like this saying, okay, first let's get this budgeted for. We know it's going to be a problem. How do we budget that? How do we equally distribute? That's everyone, you know, is kind of contributing their you know, their cost to it. And then the nice thing is when you have a, you know, pest control issue that pops up instead of the old way, which was, you know, kind of finger points or so and finally gives up. It kind of waves the white flag. Now it's only budgeted for this. Here's where you submit your claim, you know, or your work order. Someone's going to come out and solve it. So this resident gets a great experience. But then the thing that, you know, often will happen is you might roll this out and you don't see this anymore, but it's actually such a high value. The fact that the resident can just submit a ticket and get something solved, that's great. What's even better, though, is that's not an hour that your team members spend getting beat up by another investor. That is on our year on the Investor, you know, column on a Tuesday afternoon and they were having a bad day already. Right. Those are the things that make them go bust. Wouldn't it be easy just to sell this and go into something else? Right. And so I think about like, how do you look at again, like what is any test for you've ever had? It could be made. It's already obviously you know, we have some other things on filters and things. I also said how do you reduce maintenance, which in turn reduces those emotional events for your customer and makes them happy passengers. So that's just kind of one example I'd give. And, you know, you could apply that to any problem you have in the business.
Daniel Craig
So proactive, right proactive?
Adam Willis
I was just going to say I alluded to the property condition formula that which the resident, you know three days seven days after they bought out. That's really a quality assurance quality control component. What if anything that comes in on that list that should have been caught by our turnover team, like our internal team or third party vendor actually doing the work? We have a problem. We talk about it with that vendor with that. Why did this happen and how we do a report now to make sure it never happens again. So it's just mostly the tenants like, Hey, the house isn't perfect and they're taking it out. If they missed something that shouldn't have been caught, that's a problem for us.
Daniel Craig
Adam, I can't remember if you mentioned this, and maybe that's what you were just saying, is that when the person does the walk through initial walk through and move in with the tenant, that's an opportunity that you also have to do a two for one and get onsite again after the move and make note that anything as another set of eyes on the move and on the turn to make sure that anything that still needs to be addressed is getting addressed. Can you just unpack that for that?
Adam Willis
Yeah, The turnover right before a resident moved into the house. We have a turnover process and Friday around there we pre walked the house, we video the home in really great detail which is immortalizing the commercial arm to the security to bother the patient in the picture. Correct. Right. So that it's done. We moved the tenant in and we walk through the property with them and they might that maybe they have a better eye or whatever. And we can not only manage expectations like that little being in the wall, while it's not a brand new car, it's going about brand new house. They'll be next and do that so we can manage expectations because there are certain things that we just will not do. It's just normal wear and tear. But if something is wrong, we can quickly address that because we're all on to deliver a really great experience. And then that person doing the move in and not paid for by our review at the end of that interaction. So they're very concerned like, Oh, your microwave is broken, and we should have thought that they own it and they can report it. And we have a direct connection to get that vendor back out and have it fixed before they actually start to unpack it.
Daniel Craig
Enough for Yep, that's awesome. Okay. Adam, this one, Scott, If I can address specifically for you this question. All of these move processes, this is Thomas seem amazing, but how can you afford to do this? I'm doing the math in my head and you can figure out how I could pay for someone to do all that on the move in.
Adam Willis
1. A couple times. 2. I think knowing your value right way to go back to the overarching theme here is are you doing things that create value for your resident and your homeowners or to shareholders? And the answer is yeah, when you know your value can start charging your word and that generate income and that generates profit. And what you do with that profit is you're reading that thing and the more people who deliver on your overarching theme, which deliver a greater impact, your notice that they make it to work in progress, right? Like you can't have a team of 80 tomorrow. But yeah, you're going to be worrying about that happen at some home, but slowly you will reach down and say this person, I'm warning the person just that. So come to scale that byproducts of scale.
Daniel Craig
Yeah and I'm not saying this true of you, Adam, but it also helps to have a revenue per unit that's over $300 to make this possible. Right? So like, that is the. Yeah, this is, this, is that the bigger pie dimension of thinking that we're talking about here, creating more value and people love it. Nestle's got a47 on Google and people are willing to pay for it. It's it's a cycle. What's your process to make sure you're not having work orders come in? Wolf. Finally, take this one. I feel like our list is comprehensive, but we are struggling to get the number down. How long does your property inspection take? What do you do? When do you do your final walkthrough? Before moving a lot there. But I think the basic question is what's the process for minimizing workforce?
Wolfgang Croskey
Yeah, so I think the one that we notice is identifying what are those work orders coming in to identify any trends? We found that we had tenants submitting non-work related service requests about like how do I access the common area or, you know, things they just they saw in the portal. And I think it's partly because AppFolio how they list, they call it a service request, not a work order. And so they treat like a concierge. So we were able to identify what are some of those common work orders that were coming in the first 30 days and then looked at our onboarding to see how can we address that? And we noticed that for the wave properties and nature ways, we tended to have more and we realized that our onboarding, the messaging was pretty vanilla and we didn't have any specific to the ways. And so what we've done by using conditional logic, we have some additional messages that have choice specific, you know, how do you access the gate, How do you add your name to the directory? How do you get your access to the pool and stuff like that That cut down a lot of a lot of those calls. The other ones that we've done is we actually have two sets of eyes that will take care of the property before move in. So we have the main inside. They have their checklists, they do their thing, and then we send the property manager out to do a final walkthrough and we actually put the onus on the property manager when there's a work submitted, not the main supplier, because they were the second set of eyes. So that has helped quite a bit. We use the inspector, which helps, you know, organize those inspections and keep them, you know, consistent. The other benefit to having those on digital is it just it just makes it easier to share things as far as the time frame to do a moving inspection. It's about an hour and a half. I would say one thing that we're flirting around with. So Adam was talking about that personalized move in and showing them water, water shut off and all of that. That water shut off is not going to change year after year. So when we onboard a new property, we're actually starting to make customized instructional videos specific to that house and then we don't have to do it again. I don't have enough data to say whether it works or not, but that's how we're going to tackle that, because the generic welcome to your new property long email with everything is garbage. It just doesn't work.
Daniel Craig
So in fact, at that point you're talking but they're not hearing. All right. That's awesome. We're going to touch briefly on overall communication best practices and we will spend a lot of time on this. But a couple of metrics to put out here. The time to response target of under 12 business hours. I think this is true for both you of and you, Adam, if I recall from our conversations. And then also another one I think they came out of our webinar last week was touches per ticket. Any any things you guys want to add to these in terms of communication best practices in yoga?
Wolfgang Croskey
I think one thing people see this like, oh my gosh, less than 12 hours. So I know we're not supposed to talk about fees, but let's just say you have a tiered offering of services. You can take a page out of the software book and see it at the basic tier. We get back to you in 48 hours, the medium tier, 24 hours, and then our top tier 12 hours. So now you have that additional revenue to make some of these things happen and it makes it easier. You're also not offering it to all of your doors. So that helps. You know, if you're just starting to look into what they call a service level agreement, SLA, where you're just offering tier your premium offering. So that's maybe 10 to 20% of the doors under management. And so it reduces that stress in that load that your team may have and you can get better. And as you get better, then you can offer it to more of your doors. But a lot of these opportunities, like Mark was talking about having a leasing. Felix allows you to provide that value. You have to you have to charge more. There's just no way around it, but you need to provide equal value for what you're charging. And so having different tiers is a way to do that. One example that we've changed it is the work order authorization, you know, the dollar amount, which we can just automatically spend owners money. We've changed that amount based on what tier you're on. So you want to be more involved, Mr. or Mrs. Owner in your work? No problem. You get to pay more. So that's there's ways to tweak things to give an owner what they want, but then you're compensated for it. So you can actually make it happen.
Daniel Craig
Awesome. All right. Well, that's the measuring and improving experience input segment of today's webinar. We're going to be moving on to a tremendously valuable segment on measuring and improving experience outputs in just a few minutes. So hang around for that. I think it's going to be gold. What is the significant thing that was on the script or some slides that show where that came from? Let me skip through these. So we're going to come back to what's the most significant thing you can do to improve your experience today? We talk a lot, a lot of different things. What's the one thing that you need to focus on? We are putting together a tool here, a profit coach, to help you analyze your experience and some of the key interactions that you're having with clients to understand where is the again, the 20% of effort that can yield 80% of the results in improving your client experience? And we want to offer you an experience analysis call with our coaching team to help you discover how you stack up to the RPM, experience benchmarks of growth, churn and profitability, and then help you analyze and architect your experience with our experience analyzing tool. And then ultimately from there, get help identifying your number one opportunity to maximize the value create and ultimately the profit you generate as we've been talking about. So we'd love to share this tool with you. How does it work? We need some financial information as well. So you send us a panel for the last four months on the call. We'll help you see how you stack up to these key benchmarks, help you get rolling with this analysis tool and ultimately help you identify the number opportunity you need to take action on from today's discussion. So no strings attached to that. We just love to get on the phone, help create some value for you around this topic, other experience with our experience analyzer tool and if that would be of use to you just kind of throw up a pull here that you guys can use to say, Hey, yeah, reach out to me, let's get that call scheduled and we'd love to have that conversation with you. So just say yes to the tool and we'd be happy to reach out and schedule that call with you. We are going to move to our finance for Founder Spotlight. And today we're talking with that from Second Nature and the goal for the spotlight for each one of these operationalizing profit webinar episodes is just to step back from the minutia that we've been talking about, which is all amazing and think big picture for a moment about the mindset that profitable founders engage with when it comes to finance so that just, just let's just break into it here for a few minutes and talk about some of the lessons that you learn when it comes to finance. My first question for you is, as you've grown, as you scaled, have there been any significant mindset shifts around finance as you grow in your company at Second Nature? I love the pause for a thoughtful answer.
Thad Tarkington
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Craig
On that. And I think I think, you know, like, you know, some of the metrics that you are specifically tracking.
Thad Tarkington
Now, as you say, it's definitely changed, right? And I don't know, I would say it's changed because my view of finance out in backs, the organization has evolved, as I've learned and you know but I would say what I look at like finance today, one of the mistakes I think I made early on maybe say like rather than like how it's changed, it's changed for the better. But so I think things that have improved is, you know, early on and I'm a very optimistic person and I think you kind of have to be to be in business. But I've let that flow into a little bit of the way I would think about financial. So I'm like, all right, if we do everything right, what's going to be, you know, and your guess my how we do everything right, what's going to be my cost of like right? And then what you'd find out is you put yourself in a little bit of a, you know, pretzel where you're like, gosh, you know, this is low, this is high. And that starts to compound. So I think as I think about finance, you know, what a project taking is from a forecasting and a business plan and say, boy, what how do you have a sandbag and what's the conservative approach? Put yourself in a good a patient position, but then yourself to attack those problems of urgency. And that's one of the bigger challenges, is that, you know, if you have different goals, different things to what you can use. But but I think that's one key piece. And then like the other one I would say is discipline. You know, I know early on we built this kind of robust financial model with all of our revenue sources, all of our expenses. And in, you know, a mentor of mine early on, you know, they were like, this is the crystal ball of your business. Like you're not going to want to do it Friday night at 8:00, but you've got to do it like you need. You need it. You need a you know, you need you need a forecast, right? If you're going to plan now, like if the business is growing 5%, you know, it's you people like, sure, you can get away without it. But if you're trying to score, you know, scatter the size of like out of, you know, thousands of units, you've got to have a financial plan and understand, okay, what am I going to make it for an investment in you people, what I'm going to make for investment, a new software process. And, you know, so I would say if you don't know where to start there, I would say that you guys have a lot of great resources. I know. But, you know, like.
Daniel Craig
I don't know who could help you with of profit plan or financial forecasts. No idea.
Thad Tarkington
No, I know I’m kidding, but I really do like having a discipline in there like we're going to do this every month and we're going to look at our numbers. And then let's just realize, you know, I like the same big door swing on small and just there are going to be a few things. Your business are like this. This is really driving, you know, a lot a lot of the outcomes. Maybe it's your pricing structure, maybe it's the customer segment. You're targeting, right? You might find, you know, you got to see this. I'll be like, Hey, it is top 10% of our customers. They're 90% of it, right? So there's things you'll start to notice as you start to get dashboard in and views of your financials that will pop up as they're going to the next piece. But I would say discipline and, you know, really just doing financials, getting close to the numbers, every business that should be in the numbers.
Daniel Craig
All of that we're actually going to tackle forecasting in the next call with high integrity. But what I love what you said there, that is it's like build a plan around conservative estimates, but go after the problem as if you were doing the B hag forecasts with that level of urgency and courage. Fantastic. I want to just talk a little bit about investing in the business and thinking long term particularly. You talked in our pre call, you talked a little bit about lifetime value, the focus on long term retention and the opportunity to invest in service and what you see as some of the pitfalls there with some approaches. Can you unpack that. All of it yeah yeah.
Thad Tarkington
So I would say I mean this is really around finance, you know, the section, but I think know your numbers is really important. You know, in this business it's a recurring revenue. It's, it's a subscription model to an extent where, you know, you have a customer come in and they're spending money over a lifetime. And, you know, ultimately decisions you're making in your business are going to affect that lifetime revenue. Your costs are going to affect, you know, obviously, you know, to your costs. And then you're going to have your kind of lifetime profit. And so, you know, some simple things to get started is understanding like, you know, if I have a customer spending three or four bucks a month that they're going to stay, you know, three years, that's about ten K and revenue, right? And if my odds are 50%, that's 510 years profits like, you know, you can say, okay, well, can I spend $1,000 to acquire our customer or is that a good use of money? Right. If you don't understand that latter piece, a lot of these questions on underwrote where they spend marketing dollars sales, you know are hurting. It's now you're going to have second order questions of cash flow and payback period right. Like if I if it takes me six months to make that first 1500, you know, how am I going to fund that, Right? Like, now step one is getting into the numbers, understanding the business you're in. What are the key drivers? What are the financials? I should understand it. Don't be scared. Don't be scared by it. It's like, you know, beat yourself up, but learn it. And once you, you know, you'll start realize like that the conversation shifts from, you know, kind of trying to keep up on a treadmill of, you know, AJ early advising against, you know, when we didn't track our books really well right? We have all the financing, things like that. But like, you know, we'd get an invoice and be like, what's this webinar Is that is I is your job, right? So I think like, you know, getting your systems process is really important, but then once you understand all those levers, you can start to think really strategically about, if I got 100 units, what would it take to get to a thousand? You know, do any investment people divest and marketing, you know, could I handle the scale? And all that should flow on to a financial model as well.
Daniel Craig
But one of the things you mentioned on our call of that was that you've seen the challenge, like in order to kind of maximize the lifetime profit, that there's this temptation to take a short term view and maybe under-invested certain things like service to unpack that a little bit.
Thad Tarkington
Yeah, Yeah, I know we were talking about that earlier and I'll give an example of an industry I think about, which is towards the a lot of your problem familiar with that. And yeah, I've been to a couple of the different facilities, done some tours and talk to these teams and what I'd often see is, you know, a whole more business. You're typically charging 60 bucks a month, so-called $720 in revenue year, and you might be getting a few claims a year. You know, I'm not right. So let's just estimate each one of these phone calls for a claim is 20 minutes. Right. So we're talking about maybe an hour. You know, if you're paying someone $30 an hour to take that out. Right. It's been events in my range. That's like $35 out of $720 in revenue. You know, that's only 4% right. And so I think what you look at, though, you know, with this business is one of the most dynamic places like it, sir. I don't get good response times. So there are organics, bad. There's there's high. Sure. And you know but when you talk to a customer service executive, those companies are like, look how much I've lowered my costs. I'm paying you 1137 an hour instead of 1140. My, you know, here's all this sufficiency I'm driving and, you know, I don't know what the right answer is right here, but I think the question I would to ask is, you know, how you're spending 2% of revenue on customer service instead of for what could you charge? Is that a seven 2740 Yeah. And have, you know, a rock star customer service team, you know, and I have like that's something we're really focused on having invested in proving, you know, it is tough to do, but you know, like that that's the right kind of look and just like take a bigger picture and say, okay, actually, you know, if I had more expensive people, would they stay longer? Would they learn the business better? Could I train them easier? Would they be more committed? Right. But what are the what are the other outputs of that? Right. So, you know, again, I would look at any of your business and sometimes spending more on quality is going to save you money in so many other places. But like that's you know I think key is it's kind of looking at the full picture.
Daniel Craig
That's fantastic. Great advice. Think big term big picture. Think long term. Thanks that I really appreciate you sharing those thoughts through your personal experience. Or I thought we are going to go back to experience outputs. We're going to wrap up with this. And I want to talk a little bit about measuring and improving experience outputs in terms of reputation and reviews and then referrals and just other measurables. But we're gonna spend a little bit time here on reputations and reviews best practices. Adam You know, you guys, I'm a 4.7 on Google with 1300 reviews and counting, and I'd love to hear a little bit about some of the best practices that you guys have learned in terms of measuring and improving reputation and reviews and why that's important.
Adam Willis
Yeah, we have basically accountable any individual person on our team all the way up to our culture as a whole through asking for reviews. And so everyone we have a team goal of X amount of review per year. We break that or sorry, a corporate company review and a goal and that's broken down to each individual. And so each individual, we know that the app for ten reviews, you know to get one is kind of the map and we will measure that. So their direct report to their boss, they're going to be measuring that and saying, hey, how come you're asking for reviews and you're distracting out or you're asking for reviews and you're getting them and that drives change for the each person on our team because they have the accountability of someone watching them. They are also compensated for every review that they ever receive, and that helps us make sure that person is engaged and they are aligned with our corporate vision of getting a lot of reviews and being driving customer experience. And so we have a constant pulpit through that going, are they doing well? Why are they failing? Why are they failing but have conversations about that? And so they're tap to ask and deliver a great experience or they can add right to it, rooting out people who are, you know, if made through, are willing to drive change Your daughter that great, great RBD happened to be on this call. I'm seeing her in the chat. She attribute the number one way that we grow probably to herself. She's an amazing person, but number two would be record because we have such a stellar online reputation that when people are thinking of making any purchase, by the time you bought something on Amazon, what did you do? You checked the review, right? And you immediately bop based off of that or someone referred you to that product. And so we generate a ton of leads and closed a lot of business. In fact, when we're on Facebook, I see my local teammate say, Oh, I'm a low cost leader, I'm a fixed rate property manager. I say, Go read my review, but all I have to say and then the founder, we joke about it at the local chapter, Engagement engages the team to make ownership of the experience and a platform that everybody have their own outcome. Everybody vision is aligned with the company's vision and we really do hire based off of character and personality. And if they're just eager to help people that like 90% of the way there because we can teach them how to respond to people, we can teach them property management, we can teach while a role. But really, are they just inherently good people who want to deliver great experience?
Daniel Craig
Yeah. Adam, I think one of the things that struck me as being so significant, powerful about what you shared here is that to be honest, like we know that we can have a significant impact on the review and yeah, the review rating and Google or like proactive measures make a difference. Yeah, I think I've thought that in some way like maybe takes away from the genuineness of the number. But what's significant to me about what you shared here is that just the mere practice of requiring your team to make the ask makes brings them into some accountability about the quality of the experience that they're delivering. In other words, like how do you have the confidence to make the ask to make the ten x ask that you need to get the one review? Well, it's actually delivering the experience yourself day in and day out. And so I love the way that this focus on reputation actually does drive change and proactive ness in terms of your team creating that valuable experience upstream of the review occurring. So super. Yeah, I think this is honestly an underutilized opportunity for creating that community conversation around your experience and your quality that really does inform people's perception. Awesome stuff. Wolf, let’s talk a little bit about, well, there's a metric Google and other review platform ratings target 4.5 plus on Google. Wolf Let's talk a little bit about honor. A resident actually won the skip to honor referrals here. Talk a little bit about how you guys are thinking about this at your company.
Wolfgang Croskey
So for us, the honor referral is kind of like that's the best, right? Somebody is willing go out on the limb, tell their friend, neighbor, coworker that you need to use this company. We use them that that's what we aim for. So we've changed. You know, we have a lot of our in our processes, automatic emails at certain trigger points to ask for review and we just realize it's best to pick up the phone at certain points as, hey, you know, I notice that you blah, would you mind give us a review? So we're tweaking that. And on the referral side, the same way. Owner Hey, thank you so much for doing ever and just training everybody like that is the time you have like a 32nd window to say, Hey, that's awesome. Would you mind sharing about us and getting review there? And then was there anybody else's? We could benefit from our same level of service and asking for that referral and that one's a little bit harder to get people on the team to ask for that directly. But that's what we're going for that we need to be able to ask directly for that referral and not that cheesy, you know, on the card. You know, a lot of realtors use, hey, we would love to you know, we don't do that. But just directly ask at that same time we're asking it for the review. Was there anybody else that you know that maybe has the same point, pain point that we could help them with, but just, you know, being face to face on the phone and being direct and asking for that referral because it really cuts out that sales process, like when you're being referred and they finally call, say, hey, you know, my coworker Joe told me about you guys, you don't really have to get into the sales pitch. You just have to reaffirm what they've already been told because that trust has already been kind of established. You just got to confirm it and close it.
Daniel Craig
Awesome. My mentor, Steve Riddle, has said that organic referrals is the number one indication of an extraordinary experience. So that is in so many ways the Holy Grail here when it comes to measuring the quality of your experience. All right. With that, I just wanted to throw this up there. I know you guys have done some work on this. Just can you give any just broad context what these tools are and what you guys see as being meaningful ways to measure on and resident satisfaction from a quantitative.
Thad Tarkington
Yeah. Yeah. So so I well NPS is just a measurement is selling a remote or kind of detractor see sides your customer satisfaction obviously I think ever knows and surveys so you know first what I'd say here is you know rather than try and do a bunch I think doing one thing decently well is good start and if I were to look at these, I think an interesting one would be doing Yes, and you can do this. You know, I would do this for the owners and the residents and simply what is it, sending out a survey and asking them on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to, you know, refer the business, you know, kind of satisfaction. I what's cool about it is if somebody gives you like a nine or ten, you know, they'll be a promoter. Belgium Yes. If they give you I think it's less than six their exact they're somewhere in the middle of neutral And so over one apple you'll get as you're obese and you can kind of track that as a company KPI and say, hey, every month our return and we're getting better rating. The cool thing, though, is, you know, when somebody gives you a nine or ten, you know, these are two like one out there. There's a bunch you could use called Delighted, you know, pretty low cost and it sets us in, kind of automates it all. But everybody gets a nine or ten. We're just talking about organic referrals. You can just as old once a month and say, Hey, let's take those 15 we got, let's go to Super or bro, you know, let's get on the that's what we're doing well, right? Let's get some good feedback. And then when you get anything less, there's a feedback box can say, Hey, Ray, get in. Why you and what we found we do this is, you know, we get a ton of feedback. I've been really good, critical feedback that we want to hear and that's where you to reach say, hey, I know you gave us or what can we do to make this better, Right? And so I think it's you know, it's something that like universally set out easy to use. But It kind of is starts to bring inbound, you know, unhappy people that you can go, you know, fix that and fix the problem and make the driver referral. So that that'd be one highlighted. Grow it. Nobody's doing that today.
Daniel Craig
That's awesome. All right, folks, we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you so much for staying long with us today. Final actions, how to take action on what we talked about. Where do you stand? Do you have clarity on where you stack up on experience? Get in the game of financial performance with an offer from accounting standards, get converted, get in the game of financial performance and see how you stack up. Talked about. That's not the right slide. Today we are talking about three questions for architecting experience. What are the three things that you need to focus on? Leaving this call today? I'm going to lead these with you and then we're going to ask, are you solving the right problems and celebrating the solve Your team is be focused on solving the right problems. A 20% that creates 80% of your value and then need to tell your clients when you solve your problem and their problem and celebrate it with them. Number two, are you making it easy for them? Think effortless experience number three, are you getting organic, positive feedback from your clients? Spontaneous Wow responses, organic referrals, reviews, etc.? Three questions to take action on what we talked today. Go and beat the benchmark. Join us again for episode number three. Architecting Growth How to leverage the operational drivers of Growth and Profit. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much, Thad, Adam and Wolf. And folks, we appreciate you joining us today. Have a great day. And take care.
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 or 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 tuning 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.
Topics: