Peter Lohmann's Podcast
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.
00:31:27 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:31:27] S1: Yeah. I love that. It's so pleasurable when you find a highly competent person like that who can come into your business and, like, solve the specific issues that you've had in a way that makes you feel great. Like, you know that they're doing it the right way, and they're not just, like, guessing or making stuff up. We've had a lot of success with fractional folks as well. So we have a fractional HR team, Lauren Neisel with Red Cedar, who's been with us for many years now. And we also have, I guess, what you would call kinda like a fractional controller. Actually, Brie, who's a Crane member who sold her business last year. If you wanna listen to that episode, she came on the pod. But she has a background in finance, and so she's come in and really took off of my plate all the last little finance things that I was still handling and has has a bunch of projects, kinda similar to your fractional CFO, on her plate that she's doing, like, a one time cleanup on, training the team, documenting a Notion, and then, you know, she's out of it from there, which is awesome. So what... How do you recommend or how have you found these types of folks? Because I find that as the biggest challenges Because you're really making a bet on that person, and you don't wanna, like, get nine weeks into it and realize that they weren't the right person. So how do you how do you find and screen these types of people? [00:32:47] S0: Yeah. Who, I'm drawing a blank on his name, a guy that does EOS, he comes and does your quarterlies. Can speak with [00:32:53] S1: Chris.
00:32:53 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:32:53] S1: Chris. [00:32:54] S0: Chris. Love Chris. Yeah. I think he might have been... We're standing at a NARPM event. I think you were about ready to take stage, And he came and said hi to me, and he thanked me for me connecting him to several other people. I thank you as well. And I said, hey. I'm looking for... He goes, what's working? What's not working? I said, you know, accounting's not working. He's... I know some people. So And he made some recommendations. [00:33:17] S1: Oh, great. Love that. [00:33:19] S0: Yeah. He made some recommendations, and I think one of them was Ben. LinkedIn was super powerful. You can go in and be like, you know, CFOs. Mhmm. And you can search, and then all of a sudden, LinkedIn is gonna start serving you candidates. I think I had posted to a few groups. And so through my SOI, I had just made posts and queries, and I had, you know, three or four that were introduced to me. There was a local guy who was taking companies from, you know, 5,000,000 to 50,000,000 and then exited, and he just happened to be available as well. So it was a a toss-up between those two. In fact, if Ben can sunset everything and get everything done, I might bring in this local guy to do the same thing from a different perspective. Yeah. Just having the options. Sure.