Property Management Success
00:00:00 · Tony Cline
[00:00:00] S0: Welcome to the Property Management Success Podcast, where we interview leaders in the industry to uncover the secrets to profitability, efficiency, and achieving true freedom, whether it's your time, money, or lifestyle. I'm your host, Tony Cline, and I'm here to help you build a wildly successful property management business. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of the Property Management Success Podcast. Really excited today. I've got Stephen Glover, and uh Stephen has joined me from his company, Peak Property Management. And Stephen, how are you doing? Doing well. How are you, man? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm doing really good. Uh, you and I touched base about a year ago, and you were talking about getting into the podcast game. So I want to save that for a little bit because I want to share with the audience how it's been going for you, what you've learned about it, because I know there are people out there looking at ways to get into marketing. But before we do that, I want to give people a little bit of your background and let people know who they're listening to. And I know you started your business back in 2018. Correct. And since then you've you've grown to a pretty large, significant, very respectable company. And I want to take people along that journey. But tell us what it was like when you first started out, and then uh give people just a little bit of a preview of where you're at now, and then we'll kind of go back and build the bridge between the two. Awesome. Sounds good.
00:01:25 · Stephen Glover
[00:01:25] S1: So we're located in Richmond, Virginia. We we handle kind of the Central Virginia market. In 2018, I was in the fitness industry, knew nothing about real estate, knew nothing. I didn't, I quite frankly uh did not even know that property management was an industry. I didn't know that real estate investing existed. I just never thought about it. I had always been just busy doing my thing, whatever I was doing, whether it be in the motorcycle industry, the fitness industry, working, uh building corporate and athletic teams, um, was just doing my thing, didn't know anything about it. And then I got to a point where um a buddy of mine invited me to launch and said, Hey, I have this idea. Richmond needs uh kind of like a high-end property management company uh based on certain ethics and values and things like that. Would you be interested in going into business with me? And I was like, I don't, I have no idea what property management is, but I knew I respected that individual, had a high level of respect, good family man. He he had done really well in his construction business. And so I agreed to join him. Uh when I joined him, he basically just left me alone and said, figure it out. Um he would give me a salary, you know, year one until you know we started producing. Um, and so that was in 2018. In 2019, early, we started taking on some clients. I started buying investment property, everything kind of clicked at that point as to how it should work. Uh, and then currently, uh late 2025, right now, we're sitting around 1,300 units, going to be pushing 1400 soon.
00:02:53 · Tony Cline
[00:02:53] S0: It's quite that's quite a big growth in in a short amount of time. How big is your team? Uh, we have somewhere around like 42, 43 people on our team. Yeah. Are most of them local, remote? Like, how did you go? I want to take people on this journey because I think a lot of people get stuck. They have these plateaus where businesses get to and then they get stuck and and they haven't figured out how do I break through this. And and so I want to give people a little bit of an insight on just what you did to build out this team to get to where you are, because quite frankly, most property management companies don't get to where you are. And I'm I'm sure that there were some very intentional things that you did along the way that worked and and maybe some that didn't work.
00:03:36 · Stephen Glover
[00:03:36] S1: Yeah, very clear, um, very clear stages in the business. Um, when we got to around 300 units, we considered selling the company because we were like, there's no way we could grow this thing and be profitable. This is not a profitable industry to be in. This is why people do sales so they can make up for losses in property management. And so I was like, this is a loss leader industry, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but what we were doing is we were just hitting a point in the company that we need to figure out how to get past it. And so my business partner at the time actually offered, and I had no capital at the time. The business had not produced any money. We were growing at a good pace. Like we, I was very good at sales. I understood what we needed to do to get clients, I understood investor pain points. I was buying property at this point. So I knew what I was talking about. I knew how we needed to care for investors. Um, so we were we were growing, but the profit was not. And so we kind of looked at this and and we got to a point where I remember having lunch again with my business partner, and he had offered to write me a check for $100,000 to go do something else and just let the business dissolve. And it was at that point where I was like, you know, this is why a lot of small businesses don't make it because it's easy to quit. You know, there's a plan, there's a there, you can go get a job, you can go do something else. And so I even had a hundred thousand dollar check for no reason uh waiting for me at the other end. And I had looked at that and said, am I giving up or is this really um a low margin loss leader industry? And why are companies failing? What do we need to do to find profit? And so instead I went back to my partner and said, Let me, you know, I don't think I'm making the decisions I need to make because I picture this whole thing as your money. And I need to make the decisions that I feel like I would make if I own this. Let me buy the company and and be like, let me have majority interest in the company. So it's my money that I'm dealing with. And so at that point, uh he agreed. Um, so he became a minority owner. I brought in other capital partners, silent capital partners, because I didn't have any capital. I need to be a smart business owner.
00:05:43 · Stephen Glover
And so they brought in uh operating capital for the company and financed my equity purchase. And then I was gonna pay them back off the proceeds of the company. That was in 2020, and around that was a really tough year. 2020 was we grew 400% um in revenue uh in started the year breakeven and end of the year break-even. And so and in 2021, we needed to figure out it's that, and that was around the 300, 400 unit range. Uh, we need to figure out if this this was something viable. And Q1 of 2021, uh, I realized some things we need to be doing better. I realized what stage I was operating in and how to get out of it, and things became clear. And then we shot right up to 600 and then hit another uh kind of plateau from there, and then just kind of figured out we just need to work through the plateaus. But it was uh Q1 of 2021 that I realized this could be a very viable business with very good profit, and uh and you could build a good team around it and and it could withstand COVID and things like that. So I became really attracted to the industry early 2021.
00:06:43 · Tony Cline
[00:06:43] S0: Help help us understand. There's there's a few things that you said that I want to kind of lean into. You you quadrupled in size essentially, but were no more profitable with with the larger size. And then at some point something clicked and shifted. And walk me through initially, you were the guy that did everything. And I think this is a this is where a lot of the transformation happens for a company is when the business owner actually goes through the the transformation themselves. And you went through this period where you were growing, you got it up to 300 doors, ready to throw in the towel, and yet you decided not to. What what happened internally with you where you were able to say, okay, I've got this business, it's not working the way that it could be or should be. I need to make a change with the business. Did you go through any personal realization or transformation, or what did you do differently that helped you accelerate the business into that, you know, 600-door, more profitable company from that point?