Peter Lohmann's Podcast
00:24:03 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:24:03] S1: Yep. Know [00:24:04] S0: Josh. Yeah. We all know him. Like, yeah. I think you guys have hung out a few times. And he comes in, and he's like, team Joel, well, yeah. I can... All these things all these things that you think are hard are actually really easy. And I said, sure. Like, let me... I'll write a check. I'll figure... We will figure this out. And he's done fantastic work to where we're, like, seven or eight techs. We're doing all of our turns in house, and we're looking at kind of our list of of our third party contractors and saying, alright. Who do we wanna buy? Who do we wanna... What do we wanna bring in house? And getting really clear on that just so we can own that entire vertical and own that experience and for the benefit of our shareholders, our homeowners, our tenants. Like, we want quick turns when we don't want them done on time at a certain price. And having that control is actually really great. It is hard. I highly recommend it. Most people don't do it, but we are, and it's worked out very well.
00:25:01 · Peter Lohmann
[00:25:01] S1: I will echo all those comments. We have had in house maintenance for almost the whole history of the company. We have similar number of techs to you, and it is great. It's great value for the property owners, great, you know, responsiveness and value for tenants as well. And we make money on it, but it is hard. It is the number one source of occupied brain cycles of the leadership team is, like, maintenance. You know, what's going on with turns? What's going on with occupied maintenance? What's going on with keeping technicians staffed? What's going on with technician compensation? You know, we messed this up. We forgot this. We need to do this. There's a lot because it is a totally different business. It... You're basically running another business inside your management company, and it's made harder by the fact that it's not even just one business. You know, you're basically trying to run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical, like, handyman, four or five or eight or 10 different trades, which themselves are are actual businesses, are all falling under the roof of maintenance in a property management company. Now, there's challenges to not having your own maintenance of a different nature because you have to have an outstanding vendor network and you, you know, when you're dealing with vendors and contractors, you can't necessarily say, I need you to go over to this property right now and take care of the situation. You can do that when you have in house. So there's different challenges, but it's not for the weak man. And you do need a who. My business partner ran it when he was still involved with the business, And we've cycled through a couple different... Several different directors of maintenance since then. I think we landed on a great one now, but it's been a journey, and it's still not without its challenges.
00:26:45 · Adam Willis, Peter Lohmann
[00:26:45] S0: Yeah. Major challenges, major liability. That one, we actually have under a separate brand, separate entity. I have business partners in that one as well. Josh is one of them. Yeah. And and that's been really fun to see him take it on and talk about all the things that we think are hard. He makes them look very easy. But every morning at 9AM, he is beating. He is absolutely flogging his team members to make sure everything is delivered on time. It's funny. I mean, think of a drill sergeant. Every morning at 9AM, I have to put in my headphones, and he's berating them and making them do push ups and all sorts all sorts of fun stuff. I mean, he has their buy in. Like, they will run through walls from him, but he has a very commanding presence. [00:27:30] S1: That's great. So, I'm assuming he's gonna be at MX Summit? [00:27:34] S0: He is. He's speaking. [00:27:35] S1: Yep. So, my director of maintenance, Michael, is as well. So, shout out to MX Summit. Property Mail puts on a great show every year. That's coming up. This episode is coming out. So we're recording on August 31. But I think this episode's coming out this week, and there's still a few weeks left if you wanna grab tickets. I'll be there. It's gonna be a really fun time, and I'm gonna try and get on a a horse and do a little rodeo action. We'll see if they let me do that this year. [00:27:59] S0: I saw photos of it. I've been there once. In South Dakota, where where is it? What is it called? [00:28:04] S1: Rapid City. Rapid City. [00:28:06] S0: It's amazing. It's such a great place.
00:28:06 · Adam Willis, Peter Lohmann
[00:28:06] S0: It's amazing. It's such a great place. [00:28:08] S1: Yep. Alright. So tell me about some people stuff. So I I got a couple notes here. A players and having conversations with them. You love helping people achieve their goals. Fractional executives. Are you working with some fractional executives right now? [00:28:24] S0: Yeah. I have one in... One that is actively working with us. His name is Ben Farberwitz, and he comes from a commercial background... Commercial real estate background. And he has been with us, yeah, probably about five or six weeks, And he came in as our CFO, and you could not afford this caliber of guy outside of a fractional role. And so he... [00:28:47] S1: And there wouldn't be enough for him to do anyway, I I wouldn't think.
00:28:47 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:28:47] S1: And there wouldn't be enough for him to do anyway, I I wouldn't think. [00:28:50] S0: No. I mean, he's quickly learning that property management, while it's not rocket science, has its complexities and doldrums. And... But, yeah, he came in, and he did it. The the way it kinda worked is I needed someone fractional. I don't need someone full time. I interviewed several people, both local and, you know, across The United States, chose him. He came in, did a diagnostic, charged a few thousand dollars to say, hey. This is what I'm seeing after interviewing everything and digging into your processes. He wrote a 14 or 15 page executive playbook plan on how he can clean things up. We worked out a retainer fee, and it's project based. He comes in. And if he knocks all 15 things, 14 things out of the pocket by the end of the quarter, then we'll revisit just having him stay on retainer and and work with us in kinda perpetuity. And that's been fantastic. And, you know, you have a caliber of a, you know, $500,000 type person for a fraction of that pays... He'll bring order to the organization with... And he ultimately has the goal of saying, hey. I think we could probably outsource some of your stuff to a fractional controller, which would be less expensive, or you know, a group of remote team members. So once we do all the housekeeping, it's just keeping the train on the tracks. And he's... His goal is to kinda work himself out of a job, although I adore him so much. I'll probably keep him around.
00:30:12 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:30:12] S1: Yeah. That's really great. What are some of the things that he's doing? Like, love to hear just a couple little juicy bits of what types of projects or or what things he's tackling. [00:30:24] S0: Yeah. We had started... We got to the size where our four zero one k made a lot of sense. And so we went down that road, and we bumped into capacity issues on the administrative side. And we said, oh, this sucks. Yeah. Handed it off to him, and now he's taking it through, you know, the final steps to clean up and, you know, stabilizing that. God, he has... You know, one thing that's always kind of embarrassed my company, I'm just owning it, is that we write a ton of checks still, like paper checks. And that's always been an issue for me. And so he can't... He's gonna come in and say, hey. This is how... Instead of going to ACHs or NACHA files, he's like, let's go partner with the right bank and do real time payments and just start moving... The velocity of money can go a lot quicker. Mhmm. And that's something that our accounting team doesn't have the knowledge or the capacity to adopt those changes. So he can come in, write the playbook on it, teach it to our team, and our team can then execute on it. Those are a couple. He he has 14. Some of them I can't share their secrets, but those are some high level ones.