Unfiltered by PropertyManagement.com
00:13:29 · Josh Sterling
[00:13:29] S0: No. You know, when we first built it, it was it was really... We needed something, and and it's really what gave us the clarity and the efficiency to be able to grow beyond that plateau of around 300 doors for us. I thought about licensing it to others because I think that every property management company has this issue if you're running scattered site. It's super hard. Like, I'll give you a a real life example real quick. This might illustrate it better. So let's say that back in the day before we had this software, we would print off... We... You know, a bunch of maintenance techs scatter into the field. Right? We would print off maybe six or eight or 10 work orders per tech for that day and say, okay. Go bang out these work orders. Right? And they'd go off and do their work and come back to the the mothership at, you know, five, 05:30 at night, and they'd throw all these work orders in a in a bin, and they would... They write on there, okay. It's complete or it's incomplete or whatever. Right? And then the next day, by maybe noon, we would get done processing them all manually and and try to figure out where one was. Well... So what our new... What our software allows us to do is, let's say that one of those work orders was a turnover of a unit. And let's say it was a quick easy one or there's only item or two left, and that maintenance tech got done at, you know, 10:15AM today. Well, all of those old paper work orders, those are all on iPads now. And so we can see each box box is checked off, photos, notes, everything in real time. And the second he hits complete on that work order, if it's designated as, in this case, a turnover, there's a couple options for this. It sends a notification to that project manager immediately who's overseeing 1,600 doors. So he he can't be looking through each one all day. It sends him a notification. It can be email, text, dashboard on on the desktop. That says, hey. This unit's ready for cleaning. And he can go, oh, it's 10:30AM. Well, I got a cleaner that is finishing up at noon. I'm gonna send a cleaner today. And we kick it through that next phase of the turnover instead of not even finding out what happened for the next twenty four hours. That's taken our turnover time and cut it almost in half of what we could realistically accomplish because of that. That's just one simple automation there. Right?
00:15:27 · Josh Sterling, Dylan Scroggins
There's all kinds of other stuff like a single family house. You... Someone moves out. You need to cut the grass. It's it's basic. We add it to an Excel sheet. Right? That's human error. Someone forgets to add it. They don't save it right. They forget to take it off once we sign the lease. So we've automated all those processes, you know, just another small thing. And there's thousands of little fixes and tweaks that we've done like that to to the process so that we can operate this crazy business at scale. And I think most operators don't get to that, and they end up trying to remember what they're supposed to do all day long. And that's what caps PropertyManagement and Growth on on the scattered site. [00:16:03] S1: Yeah. I've... I have three kids under four, so I can barely remember what I had for lunch, much less what work orders do. So I think I need that myself. We got connected through Chuck and Matt, and they're like, hey, man. You gotta talk to Josh. He's doing some really interesting stuff. And I'm coming a little bit blind, and I like that. Right? I like talking live about these convos. [00:16:20] S0: Yeah. [00:16:20] S1: Is what you're sharing now, what you've been working on with them... And I'm not asking you to share everything you're doing, but from the AI agent standpoint, from this custom back end software, what are some other things that the mad scientist is tinkering with in the background?
00:16:35 · Josh Sterling
[00:16:35] S0: Yeah. Mean, our our custom software is really... That's our backbone. So we look at it this way. I don't wanna reinvent. We're building them on the front end. You know, at Ridgeline, it's where we signed up fifteen years ago, and they've they've done a good job. I'm I'm not unhappy with them. We're not trying to reinvent that wheel. This custom back office software has truly been our baby, and everything comes into that. So it's it's truly the operation of the business. I mean, we can track down the maintenance tech efficiency in a fifteen minute increment. We have a daily checklist for everybody at the company that, you know, if you do everything on your checklist for that day, you've succeeded. It's like flying an airplane. If I don't do everything on that checklist, I might land with the wheels up. No. That's not a win. So that's that's our our theory, and all of this is built on to this software. The the funny part was that I'm sure... I know you guys are software guys at some point here. When I first built this, I think my initial framework, maybe I spent $250 or so. And I thought, hey. I spent $250. I've got custom software. I'm good to go. Like, I had no idea that the massive investment was the never ending investment, where I'm... I don't even wanna know how many hours of my own time are in working with the developers, but we're constantly adding on new modules. Like, we recently brought our leasing flow into our custom software. So we can... It it works awesome. It's, you know, just little stuff like that we're constantly bolting on. And that's really where the nucleus of the operation is.
00:17:50 · Dylan Scroggins, Josh Sterling
[00:17:50] S1: Yeah. And your team is fully bought in. I mean, it sounds like... How how big is your team again? [00:17:54] S0: So we're about... Way we're structured, we're about 40 total across... Like I mentioned, we've got four total offices, but our our main office is probably 30 of those. Then Then we've also got a separate vertically integrated sister company and separate branding and and whatnot, separate offices, and that... That's a trades business. So plumbing, HVAC, exterior services, painting, flooring is rolling out there soon. And that's about 10 or 12 people right now. [00:18:19] S1: Yeah. Let's let's keep talking about the team because I ask people, you know, I'm not sharing too much here, but I was really intrigued by your title. Right? And I'm in recruiting and hiring, And so titles mean a lot. I love that you said you said, I'm the chairman of Epic Property Management, which I think is really interesting because there's a lot there. Right? Because you'd mentioned trying to obviously still lead the business, but also really equip the people beneath you. Walk us through the mentality and the semantics of that, right? And full disclosure, we know titles don't mean that much when you're owner, CEO, founder, president, chairman. At the same time, they all mean a lot of the similar things, but I love the intentionality in regards to that title and and what I think you meant by it. So tell me more about kind of your position in the company now and what leadership looks like at scale.
00:19:10 · Josh Sterling
[00:19:10] S0: Yeah. So, again, I've talked a lot about the plateau. So I think, you know, that your standard owner operator really starts to hit a wall about 300 doors. So we intentionally... I tried to structure around that. Of course, I did it wrong and and had to go back and and kinda reorg the operation a few different times. But, you know, I guess, first, it starts with the common theme, I think, in a lot of, at least, legacy management operators was one property manager, if you will, over maybe 200 doors or whatever that number may be, a couple 100 doors, and then another... It was these individual silos. And I always thought that was a weird system because the person, that property manager, they might have some team members, but they really don't have enough units that they're overseeing to have a robust team of specialists. And that person that's really great, say, on the admin side or on the AR side or whatnot might not be so good on the maintenance side and vice versa. So we set ours up more, I think, a similar line approach. So, like, I have one person, all they do is is AP. You know, another person, all they do is maintenance dispatch. Another person, they're just a project manager across the portfolio or a couple of those. Right? And so we're kinda set up that way. And then, you know, just general org of the the operation, you know, I think of it like a pyramid. Right? And you've got your entry level, your kind of management level, a director level, and then a COO, and then I'm ideally sitting above or I'm sitting above that person there, that COO. And split down the middle, half admin, half maintenance or side. Right? Which is probably more like 60% maintenance, 40% admin, but regardless. And so with that structure, we allow each person in each spot to run their respective small little piece of the operation. And we give these people a lot of autonomy too. Because, again, being scattered site, I can't have a project manager who would be like a second tier, you know, employee second level in the organization. I can't have him having to come back to me or my COO or even a director above him to get an approval for a $8,000 roof on a single family home. We've gotta have our team know that this is our procedure. This is our... How we operate. This is our culture here. We're gonna maintain nice units.
00:21:14 · Josh Sterling, Dylan Scroggins
We're gonna fix things that are broken, things like that, and give them the authority and the autonomy that he can actually write that check. Now there's checks and balances in in the back end to compare budget versus actuals and and things like that, and there's certainly the ability to escalate something up the chain if you need. But our goal is to give autonomy at any level, even down to, you know, our admins are approving applications and like that. You know, on on a normal day to day, that's the goal to let everybody have as much autonomy and range as they can, and that keeps us efficient and able to move quick and make things happen. [00:21:48] S1: I respect the technicality and the... Even the checklist with that because in the hundreds of conversations I've had with property management over the last couple years, when it comes to the operations and the turns and the work orders, it's, like you said, like, very documented, etcetera. But sometimes with the team, it's just all over the place. Like Yeah. This person has this title. This person has this comp. This person... We don't even know what that person does. So taking that checkpoint mentality to the structure of the team and how they're being led. And I bet the custom software and the way you have everything regimented in addition to the autonomy, I am very confident that's contributing to some really good retention on your end because people aren't questioning what their role is. When you have confusion, that's when you have a lot of people looking to maybe explore other options.