Beyond Rent: Exploring Property Management
00:03:02 · Nik Boone, S1
[00:03:02] S2: Yeah, I mean, hasn't always been, you know, able to have any hobbies. So I get to now I'm at the point where I get to have hobbies and I get to have a little bit more fun and flexibility. But my schedule is what I want it to be, so, you know, I'm not dealing with the daily fires anymore. I'm not dealing with, know, other than the occasional lawsuit that comes from a tenant, which I don't know if you guys have it as bad outside of California, but it is the first person people hit you with. It's a, yeah, it's a pretty chill life at this point now, but hasn't always been there. So [00:03:36] S1: Yeah. Well, let's, maybe start diving into some of the topics that we want to cover today because I think that's the evolution we wanna hear about, right, is how you kind of grew this and where you're at today versus where you started. So as we think about growth, which is something you've experienced, how do you define your approach to growth? Like, what is it the different channels that you focus on? What are the different strategies that you had in place to ensure that you were able to grow the company to the to the size it is today to give you the flexible lifestyle that you you wanna have?
00:04:08 · Nik Boone
[00:04:08] S2: Yeah, the very first growth thing I did was, and now that I'm in my mid-30s, it sounds weird to say things that aren't applicable anymore, but this was before Google reviews was a hot thing. Like this was, like it had kind of just come out, people really didn't understand SEO, it wasn't, you know, again, and I sound like a dinosaur now, but I really saw that when it came out and I always say I have the benefit of being really dumb. Like, I thought, What would I do if I had no connection to anybody but needed a property manager? And I would go to Google and I would look at reviews and I would see who the best was. And I was like, That's what we need to hammer. Like that's, you know, for people that have a connection or like they have another friend or so and so, we're not going to hit them. Like we're young, we're a baby company, we're not that big, we're not that great, like we still have to kind of earn our licks, so to speak. And so we just hammered reviews. So we would just, every client we could, every vendor we had, like we were hammering reviews. So that was our very first growth channel where it's like, Oh, saw you on Google. Was like, Hey, this is working, like this is nice. So we grew basically 100 doors per year for the first few years. So we started with 50, we grew 150, two fifty, and then every year it was almost consistently like, we have another 100 doors that we have now.' So, and that's kind of been true over the years until, you know, the scale... Economies of scale now were growing faster than the 100 per year, but that's how it started. Yeah. That was the very first channel.
00:05:46 · S1, Nik Boone
[00:05:46] S1: Yeah. And what's really great about that, I love how you explained it, you know, the simplicity behind that. Right? You didn't overthink this strategy. You didn't say we need to invest all of these dollars in different places or we need to have the right connections in the right... In... With the right people. You just said, well, if I were sitting down to find a property management company, what... Where would I go? What would I do if I didn't know what else to do? And I think oftentimes the most simple strategy, when executed well, can seem like the most brilliant thing in the world. And I think that's what you stumbled across. [00:06:22] S2: I agree. And I still do that to this day. Like anything where I'm like, Is that solving the simple issue they have? You know, because I have a marketing team now and they, Let's add this and do this. And I'm like, of that solves this person's problem. Like, really boil it down to the bare bones, you know, and hammer that. And so I think that's been an asset. My dumbness has been a really big asset to the company. But yeah, keep it simple and just execute really well. [00:06:53] S1: Where does that mentality come from? Is that something you learned through experience or something you picked up through education, this idea of keeping it simple and not overthinking the solution?
00:06:53 · S1, Nik Boone
[00:06:53] S1: Where does that mentality come from? Is that something you learned through experience or something you picked up through education, this idea of keeping it simple and not overthinking the solution? [00:07:07] S2: I think if you were to ask my family, I have just always been like that. They might... I have an uncle that always says, you know, he could spot me out of a crowd because I just walk like I don't have a care in the world. Like I was seven years old just walking around like nothing's bothering me at all. And I think I just have held that and just, you know, really like kept things as simple as they could and not made complex systems and issues, and I would say that's probably just my demeanor. That's just kind of who I am. [00:07:42] S1: Yeah. It's really interesting, I'm definitely not calling you lazy, but I recently heard somebody say something along the lines of, if you want to solve a problem, give the problem to the laziest person you know because they will come up with the easiest solution because they're not willing to put in all the extra work to solve it. So... No. Because I... I've heard your story. You're definitely not a lazy person, but it's a similar mentality, right, in the sense that I'm not going to make my life more complicated than it needs to be. I'm going be a little more carefree, so I need the straightest path from A to B.
00:07:42 · S1, Nik Boone
[00:07:42] S1: Yeah. It's really interesting, I'm definitely not calling you lazy, but I recently heard somebody say something along the lines of, if you want to solve a problem, give the problem to the laziest person you know because they will come up with the easiest solution because they're not willing to put in all the extra work to solve it. So... No. Because I... I've heard your story. You're definitely not a lazy person, but it's a similar mentality, right, in the sense that I'm not going to make my life more complicated than it needs to be. I'm going be a little more carefree, so I need the straightest path from A to B. [00:08:12] S2: Yeah. My goal is carefree. That is my goal. Once it becomes, regardless of money or anything else, once it becomes more of a stress factor, like, I'm like, no, get rid of it. Like, we don't need that. [00:08:27] S1: That's great. Well, talking about stress, I can only imagine as you've grown this business and, like you said, adding a 100 doors per year and then scaling that even more in recent history, you had to have faced challenges. Right? And challenges are stressful. So what are some of the challenge that... Challenges that you faced along the way? And maybe give us some insights into some of the solutions or maybe even some of the mentalities or mindsets that you had to overcome those challenges.
00:08:56 · Nik Boone
[00:08:56] S2: Yeah. I mean, I've had, you know, everything imaginable. We had to sell a vehicle to cover office rent when we started, we considered moving the office to our house just so we could get by. I mean, you name it, we have gone through it. And we have a sizable name now in town, our brand is pretty well recognized, And from the outside it's like, Oh, it's always been, you know, the gravy train. Like, I should get in property management, it's so easy! But I mean, we've gone through our fair share of everything: tenant lawsuits, owner lawsuits, employee lawsuits. I mean when you size up, I mean statistically it's a tiny, tiny number. But when you have almost 2,000 units, 1% of that is 20 a month, you know? So even a tiny, tiny fraction of issues, you're still dealing with more than one of those large issues a month. So at this point now I'm starting to see like, I try to keep in account like we have people that hate us and think we're the worst and this and that, and it's the loudest people. There's such a tiny, tiny scale and most people love us, but I have to keep in mind like, the issues we have and how many of them we have now in relation to how big we are, it's so minuscule and it's so small. So I mean, all of those, you know, financial lawsuit, every other issue you can name we've gone through. But yeah, it did not come without its bumps and bruises.