Nikonomics - The Economics of Small Business
00:26:02 · Peter Lohmann, Nikolas Hulewsky
[00:26:02] S0: It's interesting, and this is... This will be coming up here. It'll be my fourth year doing it, I think. It started to become sort of like something I'm known for, but I view that as sort of the goal. It's like you start your own company. That's great. And once you're making some good money, that's awesome too. But until you can really step away from it and come back and you've added doors and someone's been hired and someone's been fired and, like, things are still going good, that's when you really know you've got a true business and you don't... You know, the the sort of derogatory thing that people say here is, like, you bought a job. Right? You don't wanna do that. So [00:26:38] S1: It's like, yeah. It... But I bought a job that I'm the only person I could fire myself from. So Yeah. I... I'm in control. That's that's a massive deal. So I have a friend of mine who, when he goes into something like YouTube or a business, he looks at, alright, what's the minimum threshold that I wanna get to and how do I get there? And how much money do I need to spend to get there in order to get there quickly? So... And I think that's an interesting framework. That's not how I think, but he's kind of changed my mind on it. If I was sitting at home and I was like, alright, a 100 doors, how can I get there within six months? And and let's say money is no object. What would you do? How would you go and get a 100 doors within six months? [00:27:16] S0: 100 doors in six months would be a big challenge. I'll say that. I would probably allow for like one year to eighteen months.
00:27:16 · Peter Lohmann, Nikolas Hulewsky
[00:27:16] S0: 100 doors in six months would be a big challenge. I'll say that. I would probably allow for like one year to eighteen months. [00:27:24] S1: No hedging, six months. All right. You have six months. What would you do? [00:27:28] S0: If you had to do it in six months and money was no object, you would obviously crank up the online ads to the max. Okay. So you would saturate Google with PPC. There's also a few pay per lead vendors in our space, and you would wanna saturate those as well to make sure you were getting every lead possible from the Internet search world. I would also go to every single possible local meetup, every real estate investor meetup group, every realtor meetup group, every real estate networking event. I mean, there's usually, like, a dozen of these a month. It's just trying to figure out who all's hosting them and where they are and how you can find out about them. So that's the Internet. I would focus a lot on my Google score and my Google business profile. That's a big thing with property management. And so I would have all my friends and family leave me reviews. I would have all of my first customers leave me reviews. You really wanna be at, a 4.2 or higher in that range of your Google score so that you show up high on, the Google Map pack. Yep. I would also invest in an outstanding, you know, website and and hopefully a group that's really, really good at SEO because you ideally want to rank highly organically in Google as well.
00:27:28 · Peter Lohmann, Nikolas Hulewsky
[00:27:28] S0: If you had to do it in six months and money was no object, you would obviously crank up the online ads to the max. Okay. So you would saturate Google with PPC. There's also a few pay per lead vendors in our space, and you would wanna saturate those as well to make sure you were getting every lead possible from the Internet search world. I would also go to every single possible local meetup, every real estate investor meetup group, every realtor meetup group, every real estate networking event. I mean, there's usually, like, a dozen of these a month. It's just trying to figure out who all's hosting them and where they are and how you can find out about them. So that's the Internet. I would focus a lot on my Google score and my Google business profile. That's a big thing with property management. And so I would have all my friends and family leave me reviews. I would have all of my first customers leave me reviews. You really wanna be at, a 4.2 or higher in that range of your Google score so that you show up high on, the Google Map pack. Yep. I would also invest in an outstanding, you know, website and and hopefully a group that's really, really good at SEO because you ideally want to rank highly organically in Google as well. [00:28:42] S1: Alright. So I know you're going to do all those things pounding the pavement With the digital stuff, and I had... I don't know if you know who Buddy Rothmoll is, but he has a Google Business Profile agency and so... [00:28:51] S0: Okay.
00:28:51 · Peter Lohmann, Nikolas Hulewsky
[00:28:51] S0: Okay. [00:28:51] S1: I've been diving deep on that. I freaking love those agencies. If you were to rank, let's say stack rank in order of priority one, two, and three, the three options being Google Business Profile being optimized, building out a really sick website, and the SEO PPC side of things, which one of... Like, what would be the the stack order rank of those three? [00:29:12] S0: I think if you can get your Google Business profile, like, set up such that you're ranking in the map pack, specifically on a search for property management Sacramento [00:29:23] S1: Yeah. [00:29:24] S0: Or, you know, whatever your city is, best property manager, your city. If your little business with its location shows up on that map pack on the first page of Google, that is going to be a great source of leads for you. [00:29:35] S1: Okay. [00:29:35] S0: So that that would be probably top priority. I would probably then focus on the the PPC because that's kind of instantaneous. The SEO stuff takes a while no matter what you do. So I would do that probably third.
00:29:35 · Peter Lohmann, Nikolas Hulewsky
[00:29:35] S0: So that that would be probably top priority. I would probably then focus on the the PPC because that's kind of instantaneous. The SEO stuff takes a while no matter what you do. So I would do that probably third. [00:29:46] S1: I think it's interesting. I'm come from a more operational background, but a lot of people when they're doing these, they think I just got to get customers, customers, customers, I got to grow revenue, grow revenue, but there's a whole other side of the equation, which is fulfillment. Right? So it's like, okay, I could get a 100 doors within six months. But then there's the fulfillment. There's actually doing the property management piece. And again, constraints are within six months. Are there plug and play like, Hey, here's your operating system that you need, you know, use these softwares. This is how you intake someone. This is how you do a background check, etcetera. Or do you have to figure that out on your own every single time?
00:30:21 · Peter Lohmann
[00:30:21] S0: There's a healthy ecosystem of vendors and software products and suppliers suppliers in our industry now. This wasn't the case like ten years ago, but today it is. And so you can sign up with a company like RentVine or Buildium or AppFolio, and they will have most of what you need to do the basics. They'll have some sort of a built in tenant screening. They'll have a way for you to send leases electronically. They'll have a way for you to collect rent online. And a lot of that is going to be built for you, you can kind of stand up and start operating the management company. That is the good news. The bad news is that property management is filled with an operationally complex nightmare of intricacies and details. You're dealing with structures that are continuously depreciating and falling apart. Mhmm. You are dealing with people and their house, their home where they live, and they come there every night, and their kids are there, and their guests are there, and there's refrigerators, and there's air conditioners, and there's bathrooms, and there's doors, and there's windows, and there's blinds, and all of these things. And you are also dealing with money, and it's not your money. It's... You are in trust. You are in the property owners entrusting you to deal with their money. And so there's a much higher level of expectation around things like accounting and reporting and transparency when you are handling money and trust, which you are as a third party property manager. By the way, this is also people's largest monthly bill, that is the rent, and it's your client's largest asset. And so the stakes are very, very, very high for everybody involved. And if anything goes wrong, you get blamed. So it's a lot.