Property Management Success
00:26:52 · Casey Howe
[00:26:52] S2: Yeah, uh so it's great. So I wouldn't say we're sort of EOS-ish. I just call it the houser operating platform. It's not we're not gonna like market that or anything, but it's it's not exactly EOS. There's some stuff in there we cut out and some other things that we added. But it's we do have an we do operate with a system. We you know, we document our processes, we have KPIs that we look at weekly and monthly. Uh, we have an accountability chart. I mean, we it's probably 80% of EOS that we've done. And I think it's great. Uh it's you know, the transition that we're going through now, Tony, is I have operated with sort of a head of client success and a head of operations, and then I had sort of finance roll up into me directly. We are transitioning this year into a full uh what you know you'd look at as an EOS um org chart, which is you know, the the I'm transitioning into like this visionary, and yeah, I um promoted my director of ops to VP of ops. And he's really everything is now rolling up to him. And I think I think we'll both be better because of that, because everything, you know, he'll have oversight into everything, but it also provides a great opportunity for me to go out and and do some some new things. And so what do I mean by that? Well, you know, the biggest things I think we've done to scale the team are are an account. The accountability chart is really big. Who who does what and who owns what, and how do we tie that back to a number? So I'm a big believer, like if you asked me to prioritize people or process, you know, I would if you have to pick one, I'd be 51% people and 49% process. All right, I'm not saying it's 99 and 1%, but it's I I I think that by having the right people in place and providing and having them understand they own a result, naturally you develop good processes as a company because of that. And and that we could argue that point all day long, but one way or the other, I could see both sides. Um, and so we've done a good job, I think, of giving people ownership of of results and clarity in what their roles are. And what I'm really excited to be doing now is I'm working through with my VP of operations. This is new for us, and we're trying to figure out how this whole, you know, how are we gonna sort of orient this thing going forward?
00:29:06 · Casey Howe
But for the first time in seven years since I started eight years since I started the company, in like when I did my annual review in the first week of January, I realized for the first time, like I I could do nothing this year. I could work not at all this year, and we would minus the epsilon attrition, we would the business would function fine. It would just stay where it was and potentially grow a little bit. And so that's a really good position to be in because that means I can take literally my 40 hours a week or whatever it is and put those towards something that I think are gonna grow the business outside of just running the business. Literally all of my time, maybe an hour a week, I'm needed in the business. And so, you know, where that time is gonna be going is doing, you know, I want to really get involved with um understanding, you know, really sort of on the sales and marketing side and branding, and you know, becoming more of a uh persona and and thought leader within multifamily management in in New England, um, not for managers, but for landlords, helping them understand what best practices are and things like that.
00:30:13 · Tony Cline
[00:30:13] S0: Uh I love that that's what you're looking for for this year. Uh one of my themes for 2026 is I've been really driving home. I probably said it on every podcast so far that we've released for for 2026, but you know, there's there's $10 an hour work, there's $100 an hour work, and there's $1,000 an hour work. And and I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck doing the $10 an hour work. And if you did that for eight hours a day, you're providing $80 worth of value to the company. And even if you said, okay, I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna be typing up a lease and sending out a lease or dropping off a lockbox, I'm gonna now start doing the business development stuff or that equal level of opportunity. Well, the most I could do is $800 worth of value in an eight-hour day. But if you pull yourself out of that and you start doing the things that you're talking about, setting the vision of the company, becoming a thought leader in the space, becoming an authority in the space, keeping your head up and looking at what opportunities are coming down the line in the next year, two years, looking at new technology that's coming our way, that's the $1,000 an hour activity. And you can do that two or three hours a day, and you're providing two or three thousand dollars worth of value to the company. And people have a hard time understanding that if I did that for two or three hours and then I went and did whatever else to unplug to let my brain refresh, that is way more valuable to your company than you staying in the weeds and typing up leases and doing security deposit dispositions and that kind of thing, in you know, doing that $10 an hour activity.
00:31:48 · Casey Howe
[00:31:48] S2: 100%. 100%. There's a there's a Harvard Business uh review article I read in like those top 10 books you pick up at the airport, and it was titled something like Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. And that was a really big um realization for me this year, which is if you're doing a hundred things in a day and then you've got like this really important call late in the day, like it's not gonna be effective, but you can actually be a better leader. Maybe you go for a run in the morning and then you know, read a little bit of a book about how to build a better company, and then you do like some really important call with your largest client or something, you're gonna be in like a really good place with that client. You're gonna probably pick up some things that you can do better for that client that you might not have been into if your brain was all over the place. So the two aren't mutually exclusive. I think you can sort of um do fewer things, but make the impact more meaningful at the same time. The other thing I'd say is it's playing off your first thought, which it's really interesting to me. Um, I think people that have a propensity to not elevate and delegate are, we all have this suspicion that we're better at things than we actually are, and that other people cannot be as good at things as we are. Like it's that that's an error, I think, in all of us. It's because it's scary to say, like, how am I gonna get a how am I gonna train this business development rep to be good at sales? Like I'm really good at sales. Well, I'm not as good at sales as I think I am, and he could probably be better than I I think he would be, right? So that's that's this thing. I think once you can get over that, you realize there's these opportunities where it's like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not the most patient person with clients. You know what I mean? There's there probably is someone that can do that better than me. Um, so it's hard to get over, but you need to.
00:33:29 · Tony Cline
[00:33:29] S0: Yeah. You when you were talking about the the debate of people versus process or systems, you know, I I know companies that operated up to 300 doors with zero documented processes. They had their policies of what we do, why we do it. And and I think a lot of times when I if if I were a business owner and I was and I thought I know better than anybody else I could possibly bring into the team, then I create that structure of I'm the genius with a bunch of assistants. So I'm gonna create a bunch of checklists and I'm gonna create a bunch of box checkers on my team. They they check the box, they go to the next box, and you either create box checkers or you create intellectual problem solvers. Yep. And so you sometimes when we get so structured in this, we do this step and this step, and we give them 47 steps. If they get halfway through it and and it doesn't flow directly to the next box, they don't know what to do. We've created uh we've we disempowered. I don't know if that's the word. Yeah, I know. We've weakened their their ability to problem solve and to go around. And instead of saying, this is the outcome we're trying to achieve, use your brain and be smart and use the intelligence that you came on board with to solve those. We we create this box checker mentality where now I am creating a system where I have to stay involved because when things don't go just like it's supposed to, I have to be around, answer questions, put out fires, and beat my chest saying, look how important I am.
00:35:01 · Casey Howe
[00:35:01] S2: I couldn't agree more. And Tony, one of our core values is iterate and improve. It's it's uh it's probably the one I mentioned the most. And I think if you're sort of top-downing process, even with feedback, you're hindering an ability to iterate and improve on processes. And so an example of that is you know, we use Monday.com, we like Monday.com for for a lot of our processes. My renewal reps are responsible for renewing leases, obviously. They're not, it's not all they do, but one of the things they do is renewals. And and one of them just started using the technology within AppFolio, which we switched to this year, the Realm X or whatever. And like they realize there's like a way more efficient way to reach out to all of our people that are up for renewals by just leveraging this new solution in AppFolio. If we had this like documented process, it's like you have to do Monday and then do this and then do that. You know, they may not have realized that. And that's just one example. I mean, there's a balance here, right? You you can't have everyone kind of off doing their own thing, or you won't be able to pull good reports or things like that. But like you certainly, I think, want people to feel like, all right, if I own the result, how can I make this that people want the same thing we want. They want to do the most work in the least amount of time and they want to do a good job. And if and and if we tell them how to do that at times, that's that's counterproductive, I think.