A Podcast | Kandise Varvil

Pete Neubig: Welcome to the NARPM radio podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig. Today I have Kandise Varvil, who's the co-founder of PM PathBuilders, where she helps property manager companies streamline operations, which, if you know me, that is near and dear to my heart. They also help you build scalable systems and implement powerful task management automations and platforms like LeadSimple, APTLY, Monday.com, etc. etc. etc. She has a background in property management, sales and operations. She's partnered with more than 50 companies, ranging from small boutique firms to portfolios over 3000 doors, guiding them through restructuring process development, growth strategy. Kandise, that's a mouthful. Welcome to the NARPM podcast.

Kandise Varvil: Thank you so much for having me. Pete. Yeah, I got to get your. You ready to talk? A lot to me. So I have to give you so many words to say in the beginning.

Pete Neubig: And I. And I shortened that by two thirds this way. All right. So PM PathBuilders. If you have gone to NARPM conferences, then you probably know of them because they've made... over the last couple of years. You've really made a great splash in the NARPM community. So but tell me, like, the origin story, like, how did you decide? Man, there's a need here. And just tell me how you started PM PathBuilders.

Kandise Varvil: Absolutely. So we started PM PathBuilders by accident. It was not a plan for us. We kind of fell into it because we saw an opportunity, had a company reach out to us and was like, I need help. My background before PM PathBuilders even existed is I've worked in property management since I was 18, and I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was, because I'm not going to age myself today. But I started in multifamily property management, worked at the first complex I worked at was 36 stores. I was the only on site manager, went to larger multifamily properties, ended up an assistant regional manager for multifamily, realized that I'm done with multifamily and transferred over to single family, where I was a property manager. I worked in San Diego and Marin County, which are very unique markets within the property management industry.  was the property manager, went to be the business development manager, broke some things as a business development manager by bringing on too many doors and realized, oh, there's a problem when sales and ops are not on the same page, right? You want to sell, sell, sell. But as a property manager, I had a lot of empathy for property managers being at capacity. So at PM PathBuilders, Kristin and I work really hard to meld those two things. She worked with not just me, but dozens and dozens of BDMs who were also breaking their companies. So we've decided, how do we fix this? How do we make sales and operations not be adversaries, but work really collaboratively together so they can drive growth within the entire company?

Pete Neubig: You know, it's funny you say that because when I owned Empire, my salespeople would come in, they're all excited. They got another PM contract. And,  you know, it's like, oh, which one do you want this? And it's like when you turn the lights on and the roaches scatter, you know, like, because everybody's already overworked, underpaid, all that good stuff. And, once we started developing our own automations and our systems,  people were like, oh, I'll take that. Because, you know, we then built in, you know, kind of a profit sharing type deal with all the PMS and the more doors than the more profitability they make, blah, blah, blah, all that good stuff. But we had huge arguments,  when between me operations and Steve, my business partner sales. Right?

Kandise Varvil: Yep.

Pete Neubig: So.

Kandise Varvil: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: So,  obviously, you know, a lot of ways that people grow with their property manager is either hiring a BDM or really fine tuning their marketing. But like you said, operations can't handle it. And then we have a lot of churn at Empire. Our churn rate was over 30% for years because we just kept growing but didn't have the operations. So let's talk about how you grow your business through operations, through processes, through automation, through systems. Right.

Kandise Varvil: And I will tell you, Pete, you are not the only person that experiences that you are. I would... There is a there's a dime a dozen. Right. So when you think about,  the, the angry property manager, it's easy to be frustrated when you're overworked. Your processes aren't working, and then you're like, another door, right? And I, as a business development manager, I remember and I'm not going to call out any specific person or company. But I got into an argument with a property manager because I was like, I am working so hard and you keep losing the owner, right? But there's again, the empathy because I was the property manager before that, so I know why it was broken. But it doesn't make it any less frustrating. As a salesperson, whenever you're losing that door on the back end.

Pete Neubig: And let's be honest, operations is probably the hardest thing in a property management business to fix because it takes time. It takes a lot of detail and a lot of, you know, if this happens, then what happens here? So let's talk about the first step. What is the like. Let's say I'm a property manager. I'm listening to this and I'm like, oh my God, they're in my office. They're literally talking to me, right? So what is the first step if I'm like, okay, I need to I need to start, you know, I need to start. Where do I start?

Kandise Varvil: You have to start with the bottleneck. Right. So the way that I like to look at this, if were coming in to a company and they're like, we're not growing. And I'm like, how? And they're like, I don't know. I would first say, okay, let's sit down and let's look at your team. Do we have the right people in the right seats? And I know everyone says that. Right people. Right seats. But we have to look at right people, right seats. And we also have to look at right process, right person. So do we have the right people operating in the correct process, and it's the right people doing the specific jobs within those processes. And we also have to look at, again, where are the bottlenecks and where is the company breaking? Is it that we are like our operations team is just sitting in there bored because they don't have enough work? Well, then we know this is a sales problem. Is our sales person crushing it? But our operations people are just dropping out on the back end. We see that usually more than we see a sales person that's not doing a great job. A lot of the times it's the back end can't handle it, and we're telling salespeople to stop. So we have to bird's eye view it first. Sometimes bird's eye view doesn't work great because there's a lot of little breaks that are causing problems. And that's where we do what I like to call process audit. And that's where we get granular. We're looking process by process to determine how are we going to actually achieve growth within the company.

Pete Neubig: And you're not just looking at operational processes, you guys are looking at marketing processes and sales processes as well. Yeah, I've always been taught like, okay, are are the right leads coming in the door check. They're coming. The right leads are coming in the door. We call them opportunities. That means my marketing is working great. Our salespeople, do they have a good conversion rate? Are they converting? Are they closing that business, check. They're closing that business. Okay. Now it gets a little bit harder because now there's lots of operations, there's onboarding and maintenance and turns and lease renewals and yada, yada yada. Right. So, let's assume in this case study that my marketing and my sales are working. And it's the challenge of like, I'm getting too many doors. My people are,  they're just overwhelmed. Do you look at org structure as well?

Kandise Varvil: Yeah. And you have to you can't ignore org structure. And one of the first conversations I have with a company is what is our what's our structure of the company. Are we departmental? Are we portfolio? Are we pod? I know there's some other ones, but I don't care about those. Those are the three that are really common within the hybrid.

Pete Neubig: Hybrid would come into play there. Yeah. Smaller firms.

Kandise Varvil: Yeah. And so as we think about or are you an owner also you're the sales person also you're doing everything else in the business. Right? I don't know what that we'll call that portfolio. Right.

Pete Neubig: So we'll call that self-employed.

Kandise Varvil: Those are our self-employed people. You know. So when we think about these structure we have to look at okay, how are we handling this business when it comes in. Where is it funneling to. Right. And so there's a few things we could have. The one that I hate to see is when we have enough people like we the amount of doors we have, we have more people employed than we potentially need for those doors because then, you know, okay, this is a person problem. This is because we have potentially either inefficient team members or inefficient processes, and team members don't know what they're responsible for. That's always going to be a little harder to diagnose then we have a team that we don't have enough people on the team, and now we just need to increase capacity right where everyone is working as much as they can. And we're all still overworked. Well, now we need to look at adding new team members. That's an easier solve typically than us looking at people and saying, okay, why is this person who has 30 doors in their portfolio? Why are they not responding to emails within 24 hours? That's going to be an efficiency problem or that's going to be they are spread too thin across too many processes. And we need we now need a hyper focus their role into a specific process to make sure they're doing that 100%.

Pete Neubig: So when you first come into a company, what I found is that most of the business owners, they're the salespeople they love. They love being sales. A lot of people come from the real estate side, and they're not really the super detail people. Right? In the DISC profile, we call that the high eye. They're influential. They love selling, they love talking, but they're terrible at details and with a process architect, I think you need to get into the weeds a little bit.

Kandise Varvil: You do.

Pete Neubig: And really. So do you recommend that the company has like a liaison that works within the company and works with you guys that kind of like I used to call myself the implementation specialist. Right. But basically the process person on that team is that have you seen a challenge where they just don't have the right personality that can actually help you go through that? And sometimes you have to deal with these owners that just like squirrel, you know, as you're talking to them.

Kandise Varvil: 100%. But we also acknowledge that not everyone can afford that person. Right. When you think about this process person, yes, you can absolutely find someone who is your support, your number two. And potentially this isn't the most high paid role within role within your company. But there are some companies, especially when we think about the self-employed property manager. Right. Those ones, a lot of the time they don't have the person that they can bring in. It's them, it's them. And maybe they have a few assistants or one property manager that also doesn't have the time. So we yes, it is ideal. And I think especially when any company gets to a certain point of growth where they now need to assess, okay, how am I going to continue getting the ship to go as fast as it can? They need to bring in that process person or that person who can focus really specifically on the operations, that director of ops. Right. But whenever we have someone who can't afford that role, it's just not something that makes sense within their business. Yet we just have to change the approach, right? We have to approach it the way that our audience will best receive it. And sometimes that is slowing it down, or that is making flowcharts and having them visualize a process instead of having a really heavily worded SOP document. But it's really figuring out what's going to work best, knowing our audience, and that we do have a lot of really high AIS that are starting these PM companies. And now all of a sudden things are falling apart and they're but they're crushing it at what they're good at. They just are not processed people that are great at the numbers and great at making sure those metrics are being maintained.

Pete Neubig: So let's say you come in and you realize we got an operational challenge. Do you recommend that they start at the beginning, or do you recommend that they start at what's hurting the most? Or is there some other way to go about it?

Kandise Varvil: So it's going to almost always be at the beginning. And there are times where we do have to take a different approach, because the bleeding is so severe that if we do not solve that, that we're not going to make it to the beginning and get through the end, right? I will say that's pretty rare, though. When we meet with a PM company owner, I almost always tell them, like, the ship is not going to sink tomorrow if we don't implement all of these changes right away, you're sailing. You're doing. I'm using a lot of like nautical analogies, so don't mind me. Today I'm feeling I should be at the sea right now, but that we try to explain to them, we know you feel urgency. And to you right now this feels terrible and that's normal and that's what we're here to solve. But we have to also be really strategic about the way we approach this. We base almost everything we do off of the client lifecycle, which the client lifecycle is not what our PM company is doing, but it's the experience of the owner entering into a property management relationship. So that starts with, well, it really starts with the sales process. Then we go to owner onboarding, make ready marketing, leasing move in, renewals, delinquencies, move out offboarding. So we take this trail with our clients and we walk them through the processes, the way the owner experiences that because these processes are quite linear. You cannot talk about a make ready or marketing process without first talking about onboarding, because they are so interconnected. They're all happening at the same time. That's the approach I like to take, because then we can see, oh, we could have filled this hole in the renewal process. Had we asked the right question in the onboarding process, and that helps us fill in those gaps retroactively instead of us reacting because, oh, something's missing down here that we could have solved if we just started at the beginning.

Pete Neubig: I'll give you an example. When I was doing this, maintenance was really the,  really killing us. Our churn rate was super high, mainly like 80, 90% of it. 90% of it was due to maintenance challenges. So for us, we had to really focus on building a a system process for maintenance. Now, just because you identify there's an issue in the company, that doesn't mean it's solved in a week. It's like it took us 90 days to solve that problem. Right now I had it for two years. So once I identified it, I solved 90 days. That's a really good return on my investment. Right.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: But within those 90 days at least, renewal was still broken as well. And my staff would come and say we got to fix lease renewal. I'm like, understand we do, but not right now. What I'm getting at here and correct me if I'm wrong. And I think you said this already. You can't fix everything at once. You have to fix it. The you have to fix one thing at a time, and you have to really fix it. You have to go deep and a lot of people will throw like, oh, I'll just get Property Meld and that'll fix my maintenance. When it's not a software thing, it's actually a structure or a people or literally a process thing first.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm. Oh. And we see that I mean if you have an issue that your vendors are sending incorrect amounts on their quotes, having Property Meld is not going to help you. Right. Because that's like where if we're thinking of this as being systematic, that's a problem that you have to identify the cause. There are so many excellent tech platforms within the PM industry, but I am always really hesitant for people to say yes right away just because it's potentially solving an immediate need. Because sometimes that immediate need is only what we're seeing when there's really a crater underneath. And we have, you know, we are in a drought and there's a lot more that we need to handle before we can put this thing on that's supposed to make our lives easier. And that's exactly the problem. If you go in and say, I'm going to solve this month my off boarding, and I'm going to make sure all of our owners are really happy leaving us reviews and our renewal process, and we're going to increase it to 90% renewal rates and this and this. What's going to happen is you're going to have a bunch of notes with all of the changes you want to implement, and none of them are going to be started because you have too much going on and your team can only handle so much while also responding to maintenance requests in a timely manner.

Pete Neubig: They stop the daily job they have to do, that they're already overworked.

Kandise Varvil: And there is no world where an emergency at a property is ever going to come behind. Oh, I said that I'd create these email templates and I'm going to get them implemented in our system. No, that's not realistic. And property managers, their job is people's livelihood. And when I say their livelihood, it's where people are living. This is their like day to day. There's really no higher urgency than the house you're living in. If something's not working. And so they have to deal with that. So how are we going to also have them document a procedure on top of it. That's not realistic right. So we have to balance that out.

Pete Neubig: So that brings up a good question. How do you get buy in. How does the owner of the company. So I'm going to invest this money on builders on apply or LeadSimple or whatever it is. But my team's already overworked. How do I how do I get the team to buy in? Because they have to do extra work now, right? Because I need the team to help with the system, right? I just can't as the owner, I just can't come in and say, okay, this is the lease renewal system. What I found is that doesn't work. And,  getting the team in that owns the system or has anything to do with it now they have input and I see that that works. But that means some meetings, it means some extra work. So how do you get the team to buy in that hey, this extra work is going to pay off.

Kandise Varvil: You won. You keep the meeting short and you keep them frequent, right? So implementation calls. You are having them all the time, and you are not taking more than an hour out of someone's day, ever. And really, I keep those calls under 30 minutes. Because what you have to do with someone who is already burnt out and is struggling to see the value of a software, is you have to show them and you can't just show them once. You can't say, hey, look it, this is going to automate and you'll never have to do this again, right? Especially when you have a lot of long term property managers or team members that have been doing their job without any automation for a long time. It is so hard to tell that person, you're going to have to click more buttons and log into a platform and use this every day. And you already know how to do all of this, but you're going to now have to just do it here instead and get them to say, yeah, that sounds great. You have to show them tangibly how that is going to work and how it's going to benefit them, and that if you're thinking of any change management, it always is led with. This is why this benefits you. This is why you should care. And now I'm going to show you how to do it. We're going to hold hands and walk through this together to make sure you're really comfortable before we start doing it, and you're expected to do it on your own.

Pete Neubig: I think that's the key, right? This is how it's going to benefit you. What is your life look like today? And if we when we implement this within the next 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it is, this is what your life is going to look like after.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: Right. Can you imagine where you're only putting in 35 hours a week instead of 65 hours a week. Can you imagine that. You don't have to, you know, answer emails at the end of the evening because things are being done right. So I think you hit the nail on the head. You have to show them, you know, like the life on the other side,  of of what this looks like. Right.

Kandise Varvil: Yup.

Pete Neubig: All right. So now I go ahead and I start implementing, you know, and how long typically like Let's say I say, Kandise, I want to implement all the processes, right? And I want to document them. Then I want to, you know,  add automation to them.  and then, you know, and then I'm kind of done and then I just have to like, you know, kind of just revisit them, you know, every quarter or whatever. So two questions here. One is how long would it actually take to to actually document all the processes. And then two after they're documented and they're built, how many times should I go back and review them. So two part question there.

Kandise Varvil: Yes. So the fastest that we can do it. And let's say that what we started PM PathBuilders by selling was we are going to write you a standard operating procedure, which is roughly a 300 page document. That is your step by step procedure within your company. And we're going to build you your LeadSimple or your APTLY, or your Monday procedure that matches this SOP. One for one. And we would do that in and around a 16 week cadence. So we would meet biweekly. So we'd have eight meetings with every other week was a process delivery. The only way that works is if the person we're meeting with has time, right? So if we're thinking, how quickly can I do this? It's how much time does this company owner have to dedicate to calls with us to dedicate to reviewing the process? And how hard are we going to have to work to get team buy in? For most of the companies we worked with to do that, we end up on for 3 to 4 months after sitting with the team and getting the buy in after we've built the processes. So processes come first, buy and come second. If we're going for buy in while building, then we're looking at no more than two processes a month that we're getting implemented, and now we're looking at anywhere from 6 to 8 months for us to get the all of these processes ready and turned on where we're doing, again, no more than two a month, typically one a month. But we are having a much more slow rollout of the processes now when it comes to evaluating, it's going to be up to your company. We try to build processes that are built to scale. So we are prepared for new team members. We are titling things in a way that is prepared. I have those sole proprietors who's the BDM and the PM and the assistant. What we do is we build these processes for each of the roles, and then whenever they hire someone now the role changes. But or the person changes doing that role, but the role stays the same. One company owner is going to always have 5 to 6 roles within their SOP document, even if it's only them doing it so they can scale up. When we're looking at reviewing, that's going to have to be done when we're restructuring the company, when we're adding a new software, when there's major changes to the team or whenever we are now looking at a revamp like new PM software, right then we're going to have to fully revamp that that SOP document. And I would always take a look at it every couple of months. I'd say every six months at a minimum.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I think that's smart. So if I heard you right in less than a year, I could have all my systems documented and literally built into some type of automation software within a year.

Kandise Varvil: Yeah, I think that's reasonable. But again, we're looking at buy in and we have to be ready for change. We can handle a property manager who's really upset because they don't want to have to use a task management. We can deal with that. And that is part of the change management. But what we can't deal with is an owner who's not ready for change or not ready to give up tasks, right? If we have an owner that's like, well, I don't know that this is this has been working well enough and I don't need a property manager. I can do it both. That's where we're going to have pushback. And that's where we'll have that conversation and say, okay, we don't know if this is the right time for us to work together, but when you're ready, come back to us when it is the right time. And that's harder for us to navigate.

Pete Neubig: No, I gotta say, excuse me. When I was doing this back in 20 like 16, 2017 LeadSimple, APTLY didn't exist. PM PathBuilders didn't exist. And so for us, it took like two and a half years.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: Right. Because we had to come up with the concept. We had to like figure it out. I was building stuff, you know, we built all of our, we built all of our automation in HubSpot if you can believe it, which.

Kandise Varvil: I know I can because I've dealt with some people who still have HubSpot procedures.

Pete Neubig: Crazy. The fact that you can manipulate a CRM system to do some of this automation is really fascinating.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: But it's also very expensive. HubSpot itself is expensive. Finding people that could develop inside HubSpot is very expensive. So you've taken something that, you know, we did really well two and a half years, and we focused on it two and a half years. You got it down to eight months.

Kandise Varvil: Because also I'm not answering owner calls. Pete. I'm not I, I wake up every day and I'm I don't have to worry about a flood. I have not thought about a roof caving in due to a water leak in years and years, or a resident not paying rent. I've got the time right. I have a feeling that wasn't the case for you when it took you two years to build a process, because that was you were doing that in addition to also managing a portfolio of properties, right? So there is a big difference there for trying to do it in-house versus contracting someone.

Pete Neubig: Also, like, you know, when you learn something new, it takes you time, right? Which is one of the challenges of like, hey property manager, I know you've been doing this for 20 years, but now we're going to do it in this system. And at first they're like, golly, this is taking me longer than if I would just done it the old way, right? But then after about 30 days, all of a sudden it's like, Holy crap, I have all this time on my hands now.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: And like challenges. Less escalations coming up.

Kandise Varvil: I just had that moment, we had a big breakthrough with a company I'm working with where it has been. We have property managers that have been with this company for like I think the longest has been there for almost 17 years now. And so we have people who've done this job and they can do it so well. And they do not need anyone to tell them what to do. Right. But we had,  the delinquency process is one of my favorites because of the way the automation works. You typically don't have to touch it at all until you hit the point where you need to post notices. So we had these property managers, they were really they were they were open to it. But there was a lot of convincing that had to be done. Once we finally got to the point where we turned this delinquency process live in the first month, they did not have to send any reminders to residents for rent payments. They did not have to manually tell an owner that a resident's rent was going to be late, and that they wouldn't get their draw at the right time. All of this happened automatically when I got on that follow up call with them, and they were like, that was so cool. It's like, those are the moments that I'm like, this is why I do what I do.

Pete Neubig: And they probably collected more money.

Kandise Varvil: Yeah. Because everyone was getting we had they said they had some small balances that the residents didn't even realize were there because they were never told. So they're just sitting with $150, carrying over month over month because the team didn't have time to let them know. We built a procedure so everyone who had a balance under 200 got it. Got an email every couple days just reminding them of the balance and asking them to include it with next month's rent the next month they had, I think it was 20% of what they had outstanding the month prior for small balances, and not a single manual email was sent.

Pete Neubig: So let's talk a little bit about, you know,  how creating these processes automations actually grows the business.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: So what are some of the like the positives doing this. Like because this is it does cost some money and it does cost a lot of time. Not as much as it used to. Evidently. Because of, you know, of people like you with PM PathBuilders. Like okay. What does that look like if I come on the other side. What does that look like. How is my business now able to grow? So let's talk about the positives right. So the first one that comes to my mind is less churn right. More clients. So how does this reduce churn.

Kandise Varvil: So Kristen and I call this capital G growth. We're like goo goo goo growth because this is the growth of we are not just adding doors to add doors where we have attrition on the back end and we're losing all of those doors. And now our total number of managed doors is remaining the same. This is the growth of, there's like it's a machine that's running well together. When we think of reducing churn, we have one more notification to owners. We're able to automate a lot of the things that owners get annoyed about so we can automate, hey, your rent payments going to be late and we don't have owners coming to us asking questions. They are getting answers before they have a chance to even ask. That's huge. That's a really good way for owners to feel seen, heard and cared for.

Pete Neubig: They now feel that you are managing their property when an owner calls you, even if you have the answer, they feel they're managing you right and they feel they're managing you. They are waiting for one thing to fail and then they're going to exit stage left.

Kandise Varvil: Exactly. And that there's so many opportunities for this that we can handle on the front end and just continue to ask or answer questions before they have a chance to be asked. One example in the renewal process, I like to be very communication heavy. I like to say, hey, we know you haven't heard from us in like three months because we've been busy doing A, B and C. Typically we'll build in some automated follow up, so it's not that long, but we'll say, hey, we're going to we have your upcoming renewal. Just to give you a heads up, these are all the things we're going to do in the next 120 days to prepare for your renewal and make sure that we are keeping a great resident in place and getting you the max amount of rent. And I like to have proactive emails before they even have a chance to say, hey, what's going on with my property? They have an email telling them what the rent increase is going to be. They have an email telling them when we're inspecting the property and everything we're doing on the back end, we have to remember we are doing this every single day. But the owner is not, so the owner doesn't know what happens day to day within management. So tell them, the best thing we can do is tell them what we're doing, and then they will be prepared and understand. Okay, you guys are actually working. You're crushing it. And this is the next step for me.

Pete Neubig: So what you're doing there is obviously reducing churn because now you're, you know, proactively managing the property through automation. The other thing that we're doing here is,  you're reducing the number of incoming emails and phone calls, which means that your team can focus on the work, not focusing on answering potential escalations. Right. So what that means is two things happen here. The first thing is your team has to spend less time doing the $5 an hour job, and they get to spend more time doing the $50 or $150 an hour job, right? Which means that now you're moving your company because property management historically has been a reactive company. PM sits there, they're working, and they're waiting for the email, the bing or the phone to ring, and then they get on something. Right. So by by allowing less influx come in and allowing the systems and maybe the virtual team to do kind of the back office work. Your property managers now can go from reactionary to proactive, and now they can help grow the business not just through less churn, but getting more referrals or building relationships so that when something does go wrong, because it will that that person's not going to leave you.

Kandise Varvil: Exactly. Because they know you're working. They know that you're you are probably already on top of it before the problem even started. So when you're presenting it, you have the track record that you are already doing work before they're asking you to do it.

Pete Neubig: And I would say the main way that it allows you to grow your business and become more profitable is that you can take on now more properties with the same staff.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: Right. And at some point yeah you get so many properties you're going to add staff. But now you're adding lower level team like a team member versus having to hire another $80,000 a year property manager.

Kandise Varvil: Exactly. And that is a huge part of us looking at that scope from the top, looking at the positions top down and determining what is causing bottlenecks within individual positions. Because if we can start scraping out some of those lower level tasks that a property manager doesn't have to do, and we can give those to a virtual assistant team member that's able to crush these tasks at a much higher capacity. Now, look, you have increased the ability for a portfolio to maintain, let's say, 90 doors, and now they can handle 150 or 200 because you're increasing those supplemental positions.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And I know what you're doing. You've, what you've done for VPM is you've actually built courses that remote team members can take to be certified in how to build a process in APTLY and and in LeadSimple. So now,  when you have somebody there, right PM PathBuilders will build the infrastructure. But now if something needs to be modified, it's a small modify. They don't need to call Kandise and do it like you have somebody on staff that can, you know, manipulate and modify the processes on an ongoing basis.

Kandise Varvil: Mhm. And how cool is that to think. And that's what we never want any client... We love our clients. I would work with any one of them for the next ten years, but I don't want them to have to work with me. Right. And so how cool is it to be able to find a team member that is your LeadSimple expert, and they are trained in LeadSimple. And they know how to edit processes and create conditional logic. Or there your APTLY team member and they can build in those form fields and they can create those automations. And you don't need a consultant. It's good to have it high level when you're starting. You don't need it though, like I'm a purely optional person to hire because I make your life easier, but any company can do it on their own if they have the team members and that education people have taken courses and understand how to use these platforms.

Pete Neubig: Well, I would recommend that they use you guys to build that first version, find the people and then from there they tweak the versions. Go to version 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, whatever it is. All right, so you guys have a big announcement in January. You are having your first conference. What's it called, the Elevate conference.

Kandise Varvil: Elevate Sales Kickoff. Yes. And that is our aim to again find the cohesion, help capitalize on that capital G growth and allow for individual proprietors who are doing sales in their companies to collaborate with other ones, to have marketing specialists within companies and business development managers. I'll attend a sales kickoff, which is something a lot of big companies have. So most fortune 500 companies have a sales kickoff where they bring in all their team members and they all drive to the same goal. They're motivated, they're hyped. They're all on the same page about how they're going to achieve it. It's a lot harder to have that high energy environment whenever you're a smaller team. So we're fostering that by getting people there who all have the same goals and then driving the team in the right direction.

Pete Neubig: And what are the dates for that?

Kandise Varvil: So that that is such a good question, Pete. That is going to be January 16th, 17th and 18th with the two primary conference dates on the 17th and 18th. Monday is a travel day because we will never expect someone to fly in on a Sunday. So Monday's travel day with an evening get together with the main conference days being Tuesday and Wednesday.

Pete Neubig: And it's in Nashville.

Kandise Varvil: Nashville, it sure is.

Pete Neubig: That's a fun town.

Kandise Varvil: Yes. Oh, yeah. We are stoked.

Pete Neubig: You know, Kandise and Kristen, I am sure it'll be a fun a fun conference and a fun time for sure.

Kandise Varvil: Oh, yeah. We can't wait. We have a lot of fun things in store for us. Also, I am a big liar. I gave you the wrong dates P it's the 19th, 20th and 21st. I was 100% looking at February's calendar.

Pete Neubig: Oh, there you go. Alright. Well so she's a I details not great for teasing.

Kandise Varvil: Not not today they are not.

Pete Neubig: You guys have the capital G for G-G-Growth and now you have the capital F for F-F-Fun, right?

Kandise Varvil: Exactly, exactly. And so we're going to be doing a scavenger hunt.  this is not a conference that's going to have booths set up. So we're going to have a lot more collaboration. There's going to be like a sales pitch competition. We have some really great speakers that we've been announcing. And so we are really excited. And again, if you know Kristen,  myself or Ben Smith, who is with,  bright, Bright Reach sales, he is also putting it on with us and that Kristen and Ben, I mean, they are probably the two best salespeople I know in the industry. And so I'm super excited to see what happens and the results that come from it.

Pete Neubig: Very cool. And VPM will be there to support you guys. So pretty exciting stuff.

Kandise Varvil: Oh yeah, I'm expecting you guys to win the pitch competition. Just so you know that I'm putting my bet on you guys.

Pete Neubig: I don't know, I'm sending my marketing guy, not my sales guy. So, maybe we'll come in third. Second or third place. We'll get podium. We'll try to.

Kandise Varvil: Okay. All right. Deal. Deal.

Pete Neubig: All right. So, if anybody wants to reach out to you, they're like, man, this. These guys are talking to me, I need this. How to get in touch with you?

Kandise Varvil: You can find us on pmpathbuilders.com, email us at hello@pmpathbuilders.com. That's builders with an S. You can also find me on Facebook, LinkedIn. I am anywhere social media where you can find me. And I typically respond there as well. For elevate sales kickoff that is the domain elevatesaleskickoff.com.

Pete Neubig: Excellent. And if you're listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you.

Kandise Varvil: Booo.

Pete Neubig: Go join now at narpm.org. Or give them a call at (800) 782-3452. And if you're like, man, I really want to elevate my property managers. I want them to be more proactive than reactive. I'm going to hire some assistants under them. Give us a shout vpmsolutions.com. We have a marketplace of over 40,000 remote team members specifically for the,  the property management industry. We have courses and certifications that they can take so they can get trained up before you actually hire them. You can email me directly at pete@vpmsolutions.com. Kandise, thanks so much for being here today.

Kandise Varvil: Thank you for having me, Pete.

Pete Neubig: See y'all.