Build the Systems, Then Leave the Field: Scaling a Property Management Business From Anywhere | Cameron Tope

A Podcast | Cameron Tope

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to another episode of the NARPM radio podcast. I'm your host Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. So we have an in-studio guest today. So I have Cameron Tope. He is no longer local to Houston, so Cameron flew in from San Diego. Cameron owns a PM firm here in Houston. He's been owning it for, Cameron how many years?

Cameron Tope: 2019 officially.

Pete Neubig: 2019. And Cameron runs his property management firm and not only runs it, but grows it from California. So Cameron and I have been good friends for many years and he manages my properties here in Houston. So I may have to beat him up here right on NARPM radio a little bit, especially after I just got another maintenance request. Man, don't you hate it when you hear your owner say, man, I got another maintenance request. Cameron, thanks for being here, buddy.

Cameron Tope: Appreciate it, Pete. Thanks for having me on and looking forward to it.

Pete Neubig: All right. So I asked Cameron, so Cameron comes in quarterly, but I asked him to come in because Cameron literally runs his business from California. You do not have a PM firm in California.

Cameron Tope: Correct.

Pete Neubig: So you just have the PM firm in Houston.

Cameron Tope: 100%.

Pete Neubig: All right. And how many units do you have and what's the makeup of the units?

Cameron Tope: It's about 280 units. We're growing. We've been adding about double digit door growth this year. So we're sitting just below 280, Pete. And yeah, live in California, have zero doors in California. Everything's here in greater Houston area.

Pete Neubig: Okay. So what we're going to do today is we're going to kind of go through the step-by-step process that you took to basically be able to move to California, find your forever person and got married. So congratulations. Is it still newlywed or is it a little over a year now? Just over a year. Just over a year. Congratulations on that. All right. So let's discuss it first. So tell us, go back to before California and talk about what the business looked like. And then let's talk about all of the things you've done when you had that vision.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. So engineer by training, I was working with British Petroleum as a petroleum engineer and really had that analytical mindset and real estate just made sense. I mean, it made a lot of sense and I could put the numbers behind it and do the math. And then when it came to business, we had to have a process. You had to have a system to work it. And so real estate and property management is very systematic. It's repeatable. There's a bunch of, I mean, it's a lot. There's probably 30, 40 different processes that we have, but they're the same each time. Each year, you probably run the same thing, week, month, quarter, year. And so we basically just started having a problem. I mean, and this is where it starts. It's like, yeah, I'm sitting in San Diego right now, but three years ago, I would've thought that was crazy.

Pete Neubig: That's right.

Cameron Tope: There's been a lot to give here. And when it started, I would say, it was just me and my doors. And then-

Pete Neubig: So you came from the investor side?

Cameron Tope: Correct. Yeah. I had about a dozen and tried to find a property manager, couldn't, and then just said, screw it, I'm going to do myself. Friends and family rolled in. And that's when in 2019, we officially incorporated and started taking on a lot of third-party property management.

Pete Neubig: That's a failure on my part because he should have been able to Google property management company and see Empire Industries on the front page with many, many Google reviews. I'll take that one. So you've decided to build a better mousetrap, which a lot of us that come from that side decide to do. Now, your original vision, if I remember, was just you came from the Steve Crosland ways of thinking. If you don't know Steve, Steve was a great guy out of Austin, and he basically had a hundred units and he basically had great revenue, great profit margin, took the winters off. So Steve would go around teaching this model. So that was your original vision, yeah?

Cameron Tope: Correct. Yeah. Actually, we were doing masterminds. You were doing them here at your house. And I remember thinking, there is absolutely no way I can manage 250, 300 doors. I was like, when I get to 150, I'm going to be set. That'll be perfect. And then blew past that. And something that you said, Pete, that really opened my mind is it was, as we grow, you don't deliver worse service. You can actually deliver better service because then you're not wearing five and six hats.

Pete Neubig: That's right.

Cameron Tope: You can take off one hat and give it to somebody else. And they're only wearing two now. You've got three. Okay. That person, you just, as you grow, you can get more and more specialized. And the person that does one thing a thousand times, even if they are slow learners, they're going to be much better than the person doing 55 other things.

Pete Neubig: That's right. So, okay. So words of wisdom by a very good wisdom person made you decide, okay, I don't want to just do a hundred. Now let me ask you this, at a hundred units, would you have been able to have the new vision of moving to California and running it?

Cameron Tope: No, no, no. At that time I was still doing inspections. I mean, I was meeting everybody at the property I was running around. And so there was absolutely no, I didn't even have the space to think like that, be like, oh, we could do this remotely. That didn't even cross my mind.

Pete Neubig: Right. So you didn't, you like didn't realize, like you didn't either realize that there was leverage out there, that there was affordable leverage. Cause you do use remote team members along with US based folks. And we'll talk about that. But you didn't realize that there was leverage there and you didn't maybe trust enough. Cause I know you engineer types. Yes.

Cameron Tope: Well, and that's it. You get an analysis paralysis and we've all seen it with deals, right? It's like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to analyze all these deals to the nth degree. And this one's going to make $132 and 42 cents profit. And the return is going to be 16.64. But you do, people do the same in business. I was doing the exact same where it was like, I wanted to play small, play comfortable and rather have a hundred doors that I managed very, very well. I knew the owners, I knew the properties when somebody called, I could say it right off the cuff of what it was. But the reality is if you're going to develop a business, depend upon what your goals are. And my goal was to continue to be the best property management company we could. And I thought that meant small, but that was the whole shift people. We had that mastermind here and it was like, wow, okay, we can grow and get better and improve. And that's when leveraging remote team members opened up, you know, ability to specialize and then allowing me to get out of the field, which freed up a bunch of time to be able to think.

Pete Neubig: Now, when you were doing this in, let's say 21, I think it was around that time, 21, 22-ish. Now your new vision was, I want to grow this thing and I want to leverage people. The vision wasn't to go to California yet.

Cameron Tope: Correct. That never came in. It was more of like, okay, now I'm not afraid of growth. I was an ops guy, so I was hiding in my processes, hiding in my spreadsheets, hiding in my KPIs. It was, okay, let's pour some fuel on the fire. Let's go out there. And it's actually, you know, I heard somebody say this was probably Rosenberg, but it was like, if you have a really good product and you don't go and tell people about it, you're actually doing them a disservice.

Pete Neubig: That's right.

Cameron Tope: You're letting bad property managers, and there's plenty of them out there that don't, you're letting them capture the market share. You need to go out there and put yourself out there. So I was very apprehensive to do that. And then when it switched, it was like, okay, I'm going to have to turn on the marketing. We're going to have to grow to be able to serve more people. Then that's when everything kind of just snowballed.

Pete Neubig: All right. So now you have this epiphany, you're going to grow the business. You realize like, I'm have to do marketing and sales, get out of my comfort zone. What was the, did you grow first? Did you hire for preparation? Did you build, because you didn't have systems, they're all in your head at this time. So talk me through that journey.

Cameron Tope: Yeah, it was more, I think, prepare for growth. Okay. Let's get the systems down. And then it was slow, slow to grow. I mean, just, I wouldn't say probably two or three, four years ago was when I hired my first BDM. Didn't work out, but then step back. And now I have two full-time sales guys. So we've really, but we also grew through acquisition. So that was one where there was a property management company that was a little over a hundred doors. That was an opportunity that came up and that really allowed us the revenue, buying that revenue to be able to hire more people and leverage the remote team members.

Pete Neubig: Yep. So obviously Cameron is engineer, so he had to perfect the systems before he grew. At Empire, we had me and Steve and Steve was, Steve Rosenberg was growth-minded. And so I just tried to keep bailing the water out of the sinking ship, so to speak, while he was growing the company. Now you were able to basically, now, did you have the revenue, the people to build the systems or you liked it, you did it? Like, so how'd you build the systems on a shoestring budget?

Cameron Tope: Yeah. I mean, it really started with me because a lot of it lived in your head, relived in my head, right? It was like in the beginning, it's, you're doing everything. So, you know, and you have the vision of what things to look like. So I ran that, but I really stole EOS, you know, traction and just followed that system. It was, it was a lot of just going into the book and saying, okay, weekly, we're going to have a scorecard. We're going to review that, what's good to look like, what's bad to look like. And then you keep iterating. And then it's like, oh, we had a problem. I don't want this problem to happen again. Where do we go upstream? We chase that problem to find out where, you know, my team hears me say this all the time, patch the screen. We've got to kill the fly, but now we have to go back and patch the screen.

Pete Neubig: I love that.

Cameron Tope: So that was it. It was just continuing to patch these holes in the screens to, so we had less and less issues. And then you build out this great system and we use LeadSimple, you know, as a process workflow.

Pete Neubig: Did you start with LeadSimple or did you start with like checklists?

Cameron Tope: Checklist, Trello is who we used and it was just basic stuff. And then you'd have a bunch, your checklist would be 200 long because you'd have, well, if this happened in this, if this, so you would end up deleting a 200 checklist item to get down to 25, 35, 45. And it was just, it was madness. So when Ben Servin with-

Pete Neubig: Black Sheep Global.

Cameron Tope: Black Sheep Global, when he came on the scene, it was like, hey, well, we found LeadSimple and I'm like, there's no way I'm going to be able to implement this. This is a whole new system.

Pete Neubig: Let's pause there. So two things come to mind, right? Number one is, I don't know if you guys caught that. He had a 200 line checklist. I did the same thing. My checklist literally said first name, last name, like when you entered the data, I checklist everything and that will kill, that will kill, no one will use the checklist.

Cameron Tope: And let me say one other thing about that just real quick. That I found in, especially early on in your business, that will kill you. We iterated things to the nth degree and then your business is changing so quickly. If you want to grow, it changes so quickly that you perfected this thing that you're never going to use again. Next year it's out of date.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Especially if you're growing.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. So be mindful if you are, I'm a systems guy, I'm an ops guy, but be mindful of getting it down to the nth degree because by that next year, it probably looks very different.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. What is it? Perfect is the enemy of the good, right? So one of the things I learned from Steve, who is a, Steve is an airline pilot, still today is, and he's like, look, our checklists aren't 1500 pages. Our checklist is five steps. What are the things that could kill you and build a checklist around that? So one of the mistakes that people, especially us engineers make is we checklist the heck out of something. So I think you learned a valuable lesson, right? Bring that down. There's a great book called The Checklist Manifesto, which I highly recommend if you listen to this, if you are having trouble creating checklists or processes. The second thing, I don't know if you guys caught that. Cameron kind of, he didn't perfect it, but he got the system correct. He didn't put garbage into LeadSimple. I don't know about you, Cameron, but I've seen a lot of people, they buy the hot new product, whether it's LeadSimple, Apple, Asana, insert technology here. And then they're like, well, I built this technology. And then it's like, they don't have a process documented yet, or they have the wrong one, right? Garbage in, garbage out.

Cameron Tope: Yes. Yeah. And I even was apprehensive to using LeadSimple, even though we had everything in Trello, because I was afraid about how we're going to implement it. I mean, my grandmother, if I get, when I gave her an iPhone or when she got an iPhone, she had no idea how to use anything. She could use the phone and texting. And so it was the same thing. It's like we have this incredible piece of technology, but if you don't know how to use it, you can't get the most out of it. So-

Pete Neubig: Yeah. You use like 5% of the capabilities.

Cameron Tope: A hundred percent. And so it was like, it was wild. So when I decided LeadSimple was the way to go, that's when I got a hold of Ben.

Pete Neubig: Ben, yep.

Cameron Tope: Blacksheep Global, phenomenal implementer. And we still work with Ben today. And we've spent somewhere around six figures implementing and getting our systems perfected.

Pete Neubig: So every week- Not a year one though. No, no, no. Over the last five, six years.

Cameron Tope: Correct. Correct. Right. Every week we meet with Blacksheep, and we were meeting with him multiple times a week, but we would have our action items and processes we need to develop. And then they had theirs and we would come back and we just kept meeting and kept improving. And even today we're still improving on certain things. AI is taking off. That's the whole, the girl in the red dress. And so it's-

Pete Neubig: That's the Alex Ramosi line.

Cameron Tope: Well, it's the matrix, right?

Pete Neubig: The girl in the red dress.

Cameron Tope: So it's like, if you just continue to chase things without having, like Pete said, developed processes and systems, it's not going to help you. It's just, you're not going to be able to implement it. And if you don't know what good looks like, what you want out of it, what's the problem that that system or that technology is going to solve for you? That's what I think you need to ask before you jump into the next hot thing.

Pete Neubig: I think another hot take that he just said, he just kind of said it very casual. Notice that it's not a set it and forget it. I don't create a process and it's over. He continuously reviews the process quarterly or monthly? Oh no, weekly. Weekly. He's reviewing his processes weekly.

Cameron Tope: Well, not every process, but we are meeting with Blacksheep and saying, oh, the team, our resident services, our resident experience now associated is having a problem. We can't solve it. So let's take it to Blacksheep. So we actually have, we meet with them every week on issues.

Pete Neubig: Right. But the main thing is as your business matures or grows, right? Because even if it doesn't grow, it might mature and you might put somebody into that, into that seat. And now they're seeing things that you never saw because you weren't five hats. And so that system that you put in place needs to be tweaked. And if somebody is doing something outside of the system, lead simple or, or the process, whether it's checklist, document or whatever, that is a bug in your system and you have to, you have to patch the screen. Yep. I like that. Right. I call them taps, two by fours and Mack trucks. You gotta, you gotta kill the fly and patch the screen. I love it. Okay. So as you're building a system, are you doing this on your own? Do you have anybody yet with 120 doors?

Cameron Tope: Yeah. I mean, I had a couple of local people that we were working with, but it was really us just driving and we didn't have a lot like 80 to a hundred doors. You don't have-

Pete Neubig: And if you have local people, you're not making a lot of money.

Cameron Tope: Correct. Like we're making razor thin margins. So it was a lot of just like, okay, how do we get this more efficient? And the vision was, how do we get this down to lower cost labor? You know, that was something that was in my mind, especially, you know, Pete with BPM solutions and that, you know, how can we take $30 an hour work and get it down to $10 an hour work? So getting it very streamlined and just follow this checklist in lead simple. And I know aptly, and there's other ones out there, but you have a lot of what they call conditional logic. So you'd enter something and then the right steps show up. I didn't have to go into the checklist, my 200 checklist and delete 55 steps.

Pete Neubig: You based it on the selection.

Cameron Tope: Correct. So anybody could go in as long as they entered the information correctly, they could get the next sequential steps. I love it at all. So that's when we went and said, okay, what of this process can we take and put to $10 an hour work? And that's when we slowly work. And actually we still have one of the VAs today over three and a half, almost four years that we use to do some bookkeeping and just random tasks, but they would show up properly all in one place and lead simple, and they would be assigned with instructions. And there you go. If you had questions, then we went in and fix the task.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So a couple of things there. One is, it reminds me of Tony Klein. Tony Klein has this, he's a coach in the industry. Love Tony. Shout out to Tony. Tony has the $100, $10, and $1,000 hour jobs, right? So if you're a business owner, write down all the stuff that you do on a daily or weekly basis and put one, two or $3 signs. And if you're doing a lot of $1 and $2 dollar signs, that should be offloaded. You should be spending the majority of your time on the $3 dollar signs.

Cameron Tope: I like that. And shout out to Todd O, because he mentions how much time he spends each day trying to automate and outsource. So when he has a task, he spends his first, he wrote about this in one of his newsletters, but the first 20, 30 minutes of his day is, how do I get rid of all my tasks? And so if you just keep doing that, maybe it is- Well, eventually tasks are hats.

Pete Neubig: And so the more tasks you can either automate or get over to somebody to run, I'm a big fan of hiring people to run a system, a role. So I hired somebody, they ran the turn. I hired somebody, they ran lease renewals. I hired somebody, they ran resident services. And the reason why you can do this is because if you have processes, you could cross train and if somebody goes out, they could just run the process and they can get the job done for a week while somebody else is on vacation without tons of training.

Cameron Tope: A hundred percent. And that's it. Once you have a team of a handful of people, it's like, okay, I'm getting this task. Who can this task go to? Or what hat is appropriate for it to go to? And then you got to start thinking about, okay, sequential tasks. I don't want to hand it off to resident services, resident services hand it off to the renewal person, hand it back to resident services.

Pete Neubig: When you're changing plates, things fall off the plate and next thing you know, that creates chaos in your business.

Cameron Tope: Correct. Inefficiencies, we call it when you drop the baton, it's like just drops.

Pete Neubig: Yep. All right. So by creating systems, obviously you are reduced churn. You can reduce the amount of time it takes for somebody to get trained up in your business. It keeps people stress-free and you're giving the same type of customer service, customer experience to anybody, right? The onboarding is the same. The offboarding is the same. The lease renewal is the same. Everything is the same. One of the things that I learned, tell me if you ran into this. When I was creating my processes, I didn't realize how many lack of policies I had. And so every time there's a decision point and somebody does it, like if we don't have a policy for it. So as I was creating my systems, I was creating policies. You know, like I'll give you a great one, right? Like a home warranty. If Pete was in a bad mood, we didn't take it that week. If he was in a good mood, we took home warranty, right? So eventually we just had to create a policy around that.

Cameron Tope: Well, what did they say? Policy is upstream of process.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. You change the process. You don't change the policy.

Cameron Tope: Correct. Your policy. So, and that goes back to why you cannot just go buy. You could, somebody I'm sure will sell you a lease renewal system set up, a turnover process set up, but it will not have the outcome that you want. You have to determine, and that's a beautiful thing about this business.

Pete Neubig: Business in general.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. It's just real estate. It's like there's infinite systems. There's infinite ways and outcomes and infinite ways to do business, but you have to determine what outcome you want. And then that's how you design that system and that process to give you that desired outcome. And then like Pete said, you create a great customer experience. You create less stress from your team because they're not coming in-

Pete Neubig: Which means less turnover.

Cameron Tope: Less turnover. So it's like-

Pete Neubig: I.e. somebody was with you for three and a half years.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. And it's just one of those where it creates a better place to work, like Pete said. And I'll give our team a pat on the back. I just looked at the numbers because I just wrote the newsletter last week. We're at 7% churn.

Pete Neubig: That's for 300 units. That's low, right? Industry averaged 20%. Empire’s was 36%. I like to outperform. Not the right way, but that's what we did. We got it down to 23%. The funny thing is, this is my big joke, every time I go to a NARPM conference or any conference, I ask people what their churn is. Everybody always says less than 10%, but the industry average is 20%. So I've yet to talk to somebody who has industry average. Not that you're lying, Cameron, but obviously the more doors you have, your churn rate's going to go up. Somebody's like, oh, I have no churn. I'm like, well, yeah, he's got five doors.

Cameron Tope: Oh, yeah. I think we were like one or 2% there for a little bit because 30 doors were mine.

Pete Neubig: Right. And you had 60 doors.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. And it's like family and friends. They didn't want to make Thanksgiving offerings.

Pete Neubig: All right. So now you create the processes, not because you want to be able to run the business from another state, but you wanted to be able to grow the business. So now you spend a little bit of time and money on it and already razor thin. So that was a really difficult decision, but one you were comfortable with. Then you started growing the business. Okay. When you grew the business, how did the systems handle?

Cameron Tope: Oh, they broke. I mean, it's even the stuff today at 280, 300 doors and the stuff we did when we were at 50 doors are night and day different. And so it's like the term process looks different. The renewal process looks different. We use job for, I mean, and that's the thing when technology comes out, it's like, oh, okay. I want to implement this. I'm not going to go buy an off the shelf thing. I'm saying, what problem are we having that needs to be solved? And one of those is like, I was going to say, one of those is renewals. We kept having a bunch of tenant comms with renewals. So what did we say? Let's create a job form where then the tenant, if they want to renew the lease or if they want to move out, they have to fill out this job form, which then talks to lead simple, puts all the information in. It's not living in our resume experience person's email. And that just compressed as much, so much time and back and forth with email.

Pete Neubig: And now your team doesn't have to think either. You want to try, I hate to say, but you want to take as much thinking out. You don't want them to have to be decision makers. That should go up to your property managers. They make the money from the neck up. Everybody else makes the money from the shoulders down.

Cameron Tope: Well, and even then you don't want to get decision fatigue. It's like, oh, wait, where is this? Oh, I have to, did they want this kind of, did they want to go month to month or year? Oh, they want to add this person at least. And people were going into their email and it was just chaos. So it's like those things, we didn't even think about job form because we were doing 10 renewals a year.

Pete Neubig: Right. Now you're doing 20 to 30.

Cameron Tope: 30 a month.

Pete Neubig: Right.

Cameron Tope: You know, so that, yeah, that, that's just one example, but definitely they break. Everything will break at some point and you just have to be okay. And sometimes it's a good break. It's like, Hey, this wasn't in, if this was efficient at the time, it is now inefficient.

Pete Neubig: That's growth. Yep. And the main thing is you're not overhauling your process. You're tweaking it. Right. So like when you say, oh, they break, it's not like break everything we did. We got to trash and we got to start from scratch. It's like this part of the process broke. Correct. Right. And so, and then what the cool thing is, when you have a team that the team member that runs that process, they're the ones that identify, they're the ones that bring it to you. And they're the ones that say, Hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z. And when that happens, it means that they are totally bought in. They have ownership, accountability, responsibility. And now I know I got them. Now I know they are a great team member.

Cameron Tope: And again, it goes back to incentives and KPIs. So everybody has at least one KPI. Obviously I want to get to the point where one person has one KPI, but everybody's got two or three different KPIs. So they know we're reviewing every week in the detent. They have to come in and they have to talk about their numbers. And if they're off, we drop it down to the issues list and they have to tell why. And so, and sometimes there's a very good reason, but yeah, as long as everybody's, you know, marching in the same beat of the drum and they know what they're marching towards and yeah, when they bring the, elevate the issue, it makes things so much easier. They elevate the issue in the ops meeting. If they can't solve the ops meeting, it goes to the detent. If it can't solve the detent, we take it to Blacksheet. That's it.

Pete Neubig: And once you get the right KPI for all the positions, that means everybody's rolling in the right direction. And then that's when you actually see growth and churn goes down and customer satisfaction goes up, all that good stuff. All right. So now you ended up growing the business. You ended up buying that PM firm, which is another story for another day. So tell me when you said, Hey, I think I want to, you know, move to San Diego to be with my now wife. I'm guessing that was the trigger.

Cameron Tope: Well, we visited, we went out there, she was between jobs. She was leaving a toxic job. We went out there and I was like, okay, I'm going to go out to San Diego for a month. She was just get changes seen, you know, let's just get out of here. We both fell in love with it. It was just an incredible area, incredible experience. And so we're like, we came back. Is there a way that we can make this a reality? And I sat there and thought about a lot. And then with Pete, with some of your mentoring and some of the groups and conversations I've had with you, it was like, yes, we can grow. And if the business has to have Cameron here and doing property inspections, I don't have a very good business. That is not a business I want to be in. You know, it's like the old saying, like you just have a job. You have a very low paying job if you're going out and doing property inspection as the owner. So I literally said, okay, I went to the team and said, guys, in three months time, we're moving.

Pete Neubig: Really? So 90 days you did this, you made the decision in 90 days. So you had to get rid of inspections. That was, you were still doing it at that point.

Cameron Tope: Yeah. Yeah. On-site pros, I feel like is so ubiquitous in the industry and I was still doing, I was doing the inspection myself or Liz. So on-site pros on, my God, for the amount of money to pay them, it's like to save three hours of windshield time in Houston. Oh yeah.

Pete Neubig: And you could push most of that onto your resident or your owner or whatever, right? So managers do it all different ways. Some of them eat the cost. Some of them push it onto residents and some of them push it onto the owner. But yeah, on-site pros, yeah, they saved me thousands of hours when I was running Empire.

Cameron Tope: Great dashboard. Phenomenal. But it did really, it's like, that was just one big glaring thing that I need to let go of.

Pete Neubig: What were the other ones?

Cameron Tope: Well, going to a water department. There are still water departments. I mean, here's a business idea for somebody. If you guys can modernize water departments where they don't take faxes and they can just, you can accept EFTs, that would be amazing because there are still times we have to go in and deliver a check to a water department.

Pete Neubig: Baytown comes to mind.

Cameron Tope: Oh gosh. And it's like, so it's just little stuff like that. Well, okay guys, you guys are all working. The team's working. I'll go do it. Like I'll do it. And it just, it's, you're just spending-

Pete Neubig: That's the $1 sign next to that.

Cameron Tope: That's a negative dollar sign. And so it was like all those things just accumulated to where it was like, wow, if I just did this or change this or tweak this, or I didn't have a system for that.

Pete Neubig: Did you, when you made this decision, did you have to hire any more people?

Cameron Tope: Yeah, I hired, I made a property management hire or property manager hire. And she was very experienced and it was great to get her in and help with the team. But I do think you have to have some sort of leadership in to be able to get the team comfortable, especially if you're local and want to leave. So there had to be something there, but Liz has been with me over six years and she's our senior asset manager now. And just, when the team is bought in and it's like, hey, I'm leaving the location, but I'm not leaving the business.

Pete Neubig: Right. So what do you do for the business today?

Cameron Tope: So today it's all leadership, training, and then sales. That's a big thing. I am not a very good salesman. I'm all operations. So I am learning sales and trying to grow this business now and have two sales guys and spend a lot of time training them and then just solve bigger problems in the business. So I meet with the team on the D10, the leadership meeting, and we talk about, you know, I'm back in town this quarter for our quarter of meetings. So we follow EOS, like I said, so this is our offsite.

Pete Neubig: How are you keeping the culture going when you're, you know, 2000 miles away?

Cameron Tope: That's hard, especially, and we have remote talent. I mean, we're in, I don't even know how many different countries now. So, you know, it is, that is probably the most challenging thing is to keep a culture. But, you know, I think we have our ops meetings. We have our daily meetings. You know, we talk about good news. We try to cut it up a little bit, ask about personal life. I have one-on-ones with everybody in the company. So, and a lot of times it's not like, Hey, why is this number not this way or whatever? It's, Hey, how's it going? What are you doing this weekend? What's going on? You know, just like trying to build that organic conversation that you get in an office where you're all sitting around the coffee pot.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And at some point you're going to grow so much where you have to import your culture into your leaders and then teach them how to import the culture down to their people. And you're doing it right now through the quarterly meetings, through the touch bases, through the weekly meetings. And you have a, how many team members do you have currently?

Cameron Tope: Seven or eight.

Pete Neubig: Seven or eight. Yeah. The fact that isn't, all right. So now think about this. He made a decision to move to California. He had to write down all the things that he was doing that he needed to offload. Then he had to find a solution to offload them, whether that was hiring internally, whether it was using onsite pros or whether that was automating some additional stuff. Then he had to figure out what am I going to do to make sure, because you're not leaving the business, which was, which was great, but what am I going to do to make sure that I instill that culture?

Cameron Tope: Yes. Yeah. And that, and like you said, Pete, that, that last piece is where I'm at now. And it is very, very hard because you bring in people and then they have, you have to figure out where they've been. You don't know that they have a boss who was a micromanager.

Pete Neubig: I'm in the hiring business and I hate hiring people. Because it's like, yeah, I got to hire the guy, right? And so how do I make sure that the person I hire embodies our culture? Well, we do it through the interview process. And then when they come on, it's like, I want to make sure I get the right person in the right seat, right? So we talk about culture, attitude, and then we talk about personality profile and DISC. And then we do kind of high level training, then we do cross company training, then we start training them in their own silo. So they're with us for almost a month before they're even getting trained on their job. And then, of course, that takes a little bit of time. But I'm always worried like, did I get the right guy? And if you hire based on attitude, you know, pretty quickly, you don't have the right person.

Cameron Tope: That has been probably one of the bigger changes that I've made over the past few years is when we get somebody on, not trying to make it work. If we know within that first 90 days, it's not ideal. We part ways and move on.

Pete Neubig: All right. So let's put, we're coming up, we're coming up against it. So let's put this on a post-it note. Okay. So give me the top, you know, the things that you did just like as a checkbox to get yourself to be able to run your business from California and live the life that you want to live.

Cameron Tope: I think the first thing is making the decision like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. You can't half-ass it. Can I say that on here?

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Cameron Tope: Okay. Yeah. You got a full asset. So make the decision. And then the second thing is, yeah, like Pete said-

Pete Neubig: Put a time on it. I think you did the 90 day, right? So a lot of people make the decision like, hey, I want to get to a thousand dollars in five years. And then I ask you two years later, in five years, right? That five years never comes. Right. So I love that you made that decision and put a time and it was a fast timeline.

Cameron Tope: Yes. Well, and you know, again, we didn't have that many doors at the time. It was like the folks there knew we were already building this process. It was just, okay, let's tweak all the processes where we pull Cameron out of anything that has to do with local and being boots on the ground. So then exactly that you look at everything that you're doing and you continue to see how do you automate it? How do you outsource it or how do you delegate it? After that, I think you have to figure out and be comfortable with the team that you have a solid team around you to be able to say, okay, guys, I'm leaving again, the Houston area, but I'm not leaving the business. So everybody. Okay. Is there any questions you guys have? I was very open with the team about that. Not like I was going to change my mind, but I wanted to answer any unknown questions. So if you leave and don't say anything to the team or one day just say, okay, bye. I think that could open the door for a lot of very difficult conversation or a lot of, did you feel that you had the team in place already before you made the decision? Yes.

Pete Neubig: Okay. So one thing is Cameron already, he didn't have any low performers. If you're thinking about making a major change and you have some low performers, you need to solve that before you're going to basically get out of the business, but be in it from afar.

Cameron Tope: Well, yeah, because you could, I mean, if somebody is just like, okay, I'm leaving, I'm moving 2000 miles away, that could rub somebody the wrong way or thinking, oh, I better go look for a job now. The company's going to get sold.

Pete Neubig: Or I wasn't performing when he was looking over my shoulder. I'm sure as heck not going to perform when he's not looking over my shoulder.

Cameron Tope: Well, I will say it wasn't as dramatic of a move because we did not have a Houston office. We were a remote, a hundred percent remote in Houston. So we already had a lot of that build out, but yeah, you know, you, again, it's, you have to have a good team and however you, whatever you need to do for that team to make it, to cultivate that experience, you have to do that.

Pete Neubig: So you have to make the decision. You have to put a timeline on it. You have to have the right people and you have to have the right processes. I don't think you can do that if you don't have one of those, those four things.

Cameron Tope: No, I mean, you could, but I think you would see your turn go to 36%.

Pete Neubig: It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be successful, right? Now let's talk a little bit real quick. Since you've been in California, you've been there two years now?

Cameron Tope: Three.

Pete Neubig: Three years. When was the business? How many doors did you have three years ago? And how many do you have today? Do you, do you remember?

Cameron Tope: I don't know.

Pete Neubig: I'm putting you on the spot.

Cameron Tope: I think, well, actually it was probably like 130, 140.

Pete Neubig: And now it's 280. And now it's 280. So proves, he proves that he can leave the business and you focus on sales from afar. So that shows you that, you know, a lot of people say, I need a BDM in, in the, in, in, you know, on, on the ground. And the fact that matters, you, you don't. And the BDM just needs to know the market.

Cameron Tope: Correct. Yeah. I mean, we do have local, two local folks for, in sales.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, but you live with, you just did that now, but you lived with it for three years.

Cameron Tope: No, no, no. A hundred percent. Yeah. And it's, it's like you have to, again, you have to have a good team. That's it.

Pete Neubig: Cam, thanks for being here, brother. I appreciate you. That's a fascinating story. Now, if you listen to this and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you. You definitely should be a NARPM member. You could go to narpm.org or give them a call at 800-782-3452. And if you want to run your business from afar and you need great people, give us, give us a try. Go to vpmsolutions.com. It's free to create a profile, to browse over 46,000 profiles. Now we have this profile, we have hiring for attitude, we have English tests, all this stuff. And if you're interested and you learn more, you can email me direct. Believe it or not, Cam, I do not have a VA that looks at my, that looks at my inbox. I still look at my own inbox. pete@vpmsolutions.com. Thanks everybody.