A Podcast | Kevin Davidson

Pete Neubig: Welcome back everybody. And super special guest today, my good buddy Kevin Davidson. As you know, from the intro, Kevin worked with us over at Empire and was the main driver behind our marketing. So Kevin was our, I think, third hire. I think we had hired a property manager and a property accountant and then a marketing person. And so, Kevin, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Kevin Davidson: Hey, Pete. Nice to be here, man. Nice to be on your podcast instead of mine.

Pete Neubig: That's right, that's right. Kevin's got a podcast and I was on that one. And now he's returning the favor. So, appreciate you. So, Kev, let's talk about the early days of Empire. When you came on board, we didn't have any kind of really marketing plan. And you know, most of the people, people listening today, they're running property management firms in different sizes and everything. So, let's talk about those early days. Like Empire was one of the few companies to actually hire a marketing person as early as we did. And so what were some of the things that, you know, that you did early on? Because we didn't have a lot of money early on. So tell us a little bit about like, what would you do for somebody starting out in marketing for people?

Kevin Davidson: And I do have to start off by saying that when you guys hired me, I was very excited that I beat out 6 or 7 other people for the position. But then my first couple of days.

Pete Neubig: You thought you made a mistake.

Kevin Davidson: Well, you and Steve both said, here's our target market, here's your marketing budget, and I go get us leads. And then you walked away and I'm like, okay, what do I do now? And so, um, because I had several years of experience when you guys hired me in marketing, but never in real estate. So, but the one thing that I did learn in college was that, Mark, a widget is a widget, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's a product or service, anything can be marketed. And so the first thing that I had to do is I had to figure out what it was that worked to generate leads for the business. And that was not a fixed tomorrow kind of thing. I mean, this was an ongoing thing that I had to do. And so basically, I spent about probably the first couple of months learning what property management was and what I'd got myself into, um, what a real estate agent was, what a real estate investor was. And then when I realized that that was our two target markets. I had to figure out where to find them.

Pete Neubig: Did you find originally, though, Kevin, that our target market really wasn't targeted enough as our market? Like, kind of too big. And we had a really niche it out.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. It wasn't. We had not drilled down to exactly what kind of client we wanted to work with.

Pete Neubig: Right. So, if you listen to this like, I think Empire days, the first target we had was anybody with a house that they were going to rent in Houston. Was that kind of it?

Kevin Davidson: Pretty much. Because we were. Desperate is probably not the right word, but we wanted leads. We wanted to see this thing start to grow. And and so we were willing to talk to anybody and everybody. But over time, we realized that talking to anybody and everybody cost us time, effort, money and things that we didn't, we didn't need to spend on because they were either not ready or were never going to hire us in the first place.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So the more niched down or the more you can define your target, the easier it is to have that message. Right. And the easier it is to invest in the right vehicles to get that in front of the right people.

Kevin Davidson: Right. Yeah. I started with what I called my ten by ten marketing plan.

Pete Neubig: Alright. Tell us a bit more about that. Yeah. What is the ten by ten marketing plan?

Kevin Davidson: So that was the first thing that Steve and I came up with, which was basically like a chart in an Excel spreadsheet. Okay. On the left hand side, from top to bottom, ten places you wanted to market the company. Okay. Whether it be the internet.

Pete Neubig: Like internet.

Kevin Davidson: Internet, networking, uh, A print media, pay per click, social media, a broad.

Pete Neubig: And then you had something you had like sub categories under that.

Kevin Davidson: Right. Well it was across the top were ten ways to market the company in each one of those sections.

Pete Neubig: Got it. Okay

Kevin Davidson: Okay. So if you wanted to market on social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, BiggerPockets, YouTube, blogs, interviews, things like that, and then when you went to print media, business cards, uh, magazine ads, um, shirts, mugs, just whatever printed brochures, flyers, uh, pay per click, you know, um, manage my property, APM, APM, um, any other place you could Google ads, Facebook ads and then when you if you were able to fill in each one of the squares, ten by ten is 100. So if you're able to fill in all the squares now you had 100 ways. Whether you thought they would work or not didn't matter. You know, you had 100 ways to market your business and you had somewhere to start. Okay.

Pete Neubig: Well, so then you had to select, uh, based on our, uh, based on our budget, you had to select the ones that were maybe free or or, uh, cheaper. Right. Cheap, cheaper. What I did.

Kevin Davidson: What I did was, is I picked 3 or 4 free things and 3 or 4 things that, um, cost money depending on their cost. And I just implemented them, but I didn't just implement them. I once they were running, I would never decide or we would never decide if the, if that particular marketing strategy was working, um, until we tested and measured it against the goal that we had set for that particular marketing strategy and the total number of leads that we wanted per month.

Pete Neubig: Now. Okay, so I know originally we didn't break it down by strategy because it was just a lot and I think we broke it down just by total number of leads and total number of opportunities. And then basically conversions. Right. That was the original. And then how much did we spend for that month. And then based on the spend how many people did we get? How many doors did we get and how many leads did we get? How many opportunities do we get. And we would just divide that. And we did that for many years. Correct?

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. Well, actually we did that the whole time we were there. We just fine tuned it over over time.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, we're going to talk about that here. But how did you so how. All right. So let's talk about the early days. How did you track everything originally. Because we you know, we didn't track by strategy but we just tracked leads and opportunities. So how'd you track everything originally?

Kevin Davidson: Um, originally, I just tracked everything on a on a notepad, piece of paper, writing down.

Pete Neubig: Put it into a spreadsheet.

Kevin Davidson: Uh, yeah. And putting writing down what I was doing to generate leads and how many were coming in. Um, originally we didn't have, um, in my opinion, the best CRM when I first got management system.

Pete Neubig: Yep.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. So originally when I was tracking all this stuff, it was all either in my head or I was just writing down on paper every week and every month. Because in the beginning, we didn't have the weekly KPI meetings that we did later in that later years. But everything was just either in my head or on paper. And we had goals, but they were because we were new at this.

Pete Neubig: They weren't well defined.

Kevin Davidson: They weren't defined. So they were easy to hit, if that makes any sense. Okay. So I wasn't we weren't generating 100 leads in the, in the beginning, but we were generating 40. Okay, well, we only wanted 40. We didn't realize what we were getting into and how how well this could work out later in later years. Um, but everything was done on paper and in my head and basically, you know, shooting at the hip with what me and Steve were trying to do.

Pete Neubig: And I remember we had our front office girl when she would take the calls before we had a dedicated, like, sales line. Um, she, we would force her to, well, enforce her. Our, our process was when she, when she got somebody that was interested, she had to ask, how did you hear about us? And then she was writing stuff down to write. So early on we just.

Kevin Davidson: Weekly email me what she tabulated.

Pete Neubig: Oh, okay. Yeah. So early on, we were just, you know, basically using notepads and a spreadsheet. Right now, I think early on also, we were just looking at leads. We weren't looking at opportunities. So, um, this is kind of a different concept. I don't know if a lot of people talk the same language we do with leads and opportunities. So talk to our our audience about what is a difference between a lead and an opportunity for. So for Empire anyway.

Kevin Davidson: For empire, for empire, the difference between a lead and an opportunity is a lead. Was anybody on the planet that contacted us in any way, um, for whatever reason? Okay. An opportunity was actually somebody we had actually as a company, as a, um, I can't remember what we called ourselves, a strategic board. We decided what the definition of an opportunity for Empire Industries was, and I believe it was anybody that contacted us about our property management services that either had a property or would have a property that could be managed in the next 90 days.

Pete Neubig: That's right. And it was a property that we would manage. Meaning if you contacted us and you wanted us to manage, you know, um, an apartment complex. That was a lead, not an opportunity. Exactly. Wanted us to manage, you know, a mobile home park as a lead, not an opportunity. And, uh, why is it important to to, um, to decipher between a lead and an opportunity?

Kevin Davidson: Because whether you spend time, effort or money on your marketing strategies, you want them to generate the type of leads that that drives your business and that you want the type of client you want to work with that fits your business model. If you're generating a lot of conversations and a lot of activity and a lot of people contacting you, but they're not anybody that you really can work with based on your business model, then you're wasting your time and your effort and your money and what you're doing because you're not attracting the right clientele, the right target.

Pete Neubig: That's right. It's the first step to determine if your marketing is working.

Kevin Davidson: Exactly.

Pete Neubig: Right. Um, yeah. That's great. Uh, we got 100 leads, but they're all for stuff that we wouldn't manage. That means the marketing message or the target is is incorrect.

Kevin Davidson: Can I give you a quick example? Yeah. So this started later. But when I remember when I started doing Facebook ads, I remember. And I got really excited.

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Kevin Davidson: I figured that out. But remember when I first started doing it, I got really excited because we were getting in a 30 day cycle, anywhere from 75 to 100 leads through the Facebook ads. But if you remember, I remember because it bugged me for 30 to 45 days, the first 2 or 3 months we did it. Most of those leads were people that were looking to rent a house.

Pete Neubig: So they didn't look for management. They were just looking for leasing.

Kevin Davidson: Exactly. They were not the type of lead that I was trying to go after. And the reason was when I finally figured out what it was, it was because of one word In the ad.

Pete Neubig: Interesting.

Kevin Davidson: I use the word rental property instead of the word investment property in the ad, and when I change the words from rental to investor, the number of leads went considerably down. But they were all investors looking for property management.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, there's so much to unpack there because, uh, a couple of things you did was you, uh, you didn't just throw it away, right? Like it's not working. There's we're just getting the wrong kind of leads. Let's stop it and go somewhere else. You actually said no, let's. We're. Now that we're measuring it, we know that it's it's we're getting something, but we're not getting the right thing. Now, let me change it. Right. Let me change the the the verbiage in this case. And the verbiage literally changed it. And now we started getting maybe less leads but more opportunities.

Kevin Davidson: Well, more opportunities which led to a greatly higher conversion rate. That's I don't care if you're getting a thousand leads in every month if you're only closing two of them, Um, that's terrible. But if you're getting ten and you're closing six, that's 60%. Yeah, that's straight to the bottom line.

Pete Neubig: If you're not getting the right type of leads, i.e. opportunities, it's a lot. One is you're you're wasting investment dollars. You're wasting money on the marketing. But two, you're wasting money on the back end too for answering all those calls. And then the one that you don't answer because you're so busy with all these quote unquote leads, you miss the opportunity. I remember early on, Kev, I don't know if you remember this, but even before I met you, Steve and I used to own a bunch of low income properties, and we would advertise, you know, uh, what is it, a bad credit? Okay. Guess who called us a bunch of people that we were never going to rent to because they had bad credit, and a few people that were good. We missed because I was literally getting a thousand phone calls a day, and I couldn't answer them all. And so you end up saying, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and rent this. The the worst, you know, the best of the worst. And we changed our marketing even for those properties. We ended up getting less people, but but better people. So I think at the end of the I think the the game is saying, hey, it doesn't matter if you get less as long as you get the right people.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. Better quality. And then when you combine, when you when you take that strategy and you're okay with less but better, and then you take that same idea and you, you connect it to different types of other marketing strategies. Now you find yourself getting a lower lead count, but from 5 or 10 different places that are better quality. And now you're closing doors because you're getting the right type of lead.

Pete Neubig: Yep.

Kevin Davidson: And that's what we did.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And the other thing that you did, we talked a little bit about this, but you were as time went on, you were really able to define our target market and our niche and what we did. Uh, one of the things early on, I don't know if you remember this, Kevin, but, uh, with Empire, because we had a hard time generating leads. Right in the very beginning, we started doing different Foreign services, and we started doing eviction only services and lease only services and make ready only services. Like I remember one time, um, I was managing a rehab, which I've never done, and luckily we broke even on that bad boy. But we would, we would. The chaos on the back end of operations was crazy, because we didn't have the systems for eviction only, and lease only and maintenance only, and make ready only and rehab only. And until we were able to really define our target and get our marketing to work and get these opportunities, now we can kind of get rid of everything else, because now we had enough business coming in, um, because we were getting the right marketing.

Kevin Davidson: You remember what Steve used to always say, we only make cheese pizzas because we are damn good at them. We don't make pepperoni, we don't make sausage, we only do cheese. And that's all we're going to do.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. If you're listening to this and you're not niche down and you're not just doing single family property management in a specific area. Um, you're probably running a chaotic business, and you're, you know, like, and you might need to do that to survive for a little bit, but eventually you got to get rid of that and really focus on your marketing and get better at marketing to get that phone to ring.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. If there's something to say for that old saying that, uh, less is more, and I need people to understand out there that that aren't marketing or necessarily salespeople. Marketing is sales is not the same thing. There are people.

Pete Neubig: That do elaborate on that.

Kevin Davidson: They're not the. So I never considered myself to be a sales person. Okay. Marketing is getting people interested in what it is you're selling, whether it's a product or service. Okay. Getting them to come to the waterhole. All right. Sales is convincing them to drink from the waterhole. There's a big difference. If you don't have people coming to the waterhole, you've got no one to talk to about drinking what's in there. And it's it's it's it's huge. People need to understand that that in real estate, a real estate agent on their own has to learn how to wear both hats. But when we were when we were running Empire Industries, you guys learned quickly, this is why you hired me, that marketing and sales is not the same thing, because Steve was trying to do both of them. Okay. And and again, I'll tell people all the time, every day. I can't get an egg farmer to buy his own eggs, but I can get him and convinced in eggs that I'm trying to sell him. He'll come look at them. But then that's where I'm. I'm done because. So we had we took that concept and I would generate the leads and then they would be handed off to our sales team.

Pete Neubig: Now, one of the challenges that we had early on was, uh, marketing would deem something as an opportunity before we define the opportunities, right? We would we would, you know, pull something out of the air and say, okay, this is an opportunity. And then sales would get upset because they, you know, we're looking at their conversion rate, right. So, so then we've we we defined opportunity and we had everybody kind of sign off on it in in theory right. We had sales.

Kevin Davidson: That's why I said earlier the whole strategic team decided what the definition was.

Pete Neubig: That's right. And then we pushed it down to everybody. Right. We were all on an agreement and we didn't win like marketing didn't win every every battle. And and sales didn't win every battle we came up with, this is what we're going to do, right. Uh, and then so that's why. So then so you look at the lead, then you look at the opportunity. And now we're looking at that conversion rate of, of opportunities to leads. And that is an indicator of how well our messaging and our marketing is working out there to get the type of clients we want. And you got that, if I recall, you got that up to a little over 50%, if I'm not mistaken.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. In in the later years when I fine tuned it and everything. Um, our our goal was 40%. That was our. That's what we decided as a strategic team. That the 40%, no matter how many, um, leads I had coming in, at least 40% of them needed to be opportunities. And then of the 40% sales needed to convert 40% of the opportunities into doors. So you're right, in the beginning, I remember being at the table and arguing about whether that was an opportunity or not. Yeah. Once we set these goals and defined these definitions. Now we're sitting at the table and we're looking at the spreadsheet. And Kevin hit 53% opportunity rate on his leads. Um, sales. How come we only converted 23% of your doors? Well, Kevin, no no no no no no no, Kevin met his goals. He actually exceeded them. So the conversation is not about that.

Pete Neubig: It became it became math. Right. Before before we define what an opportunity was. It was a lot of, uh, passion. And it was a lot of feeling. Right. Once we defined it and we all agreed on it, then Kevin hit his number. Right. Of 40 or I think you had 55% at the end. I think that we got to 55%. Um, but let's just use 50%. Let's say we got 100 leads. I know we got more than that, but we got 50, 50 opportunities. Then, um, it was sales job to get 40 or 50% of that. And when when we weren't hitting the opportunity percentage, we knew that we had a marketing challenge that we had to fix. If we didn't hit the percentage of conversions, then we knew we had a sales challenge that we had to fix. So by tracking these numbers as the CEO, I was able to pinpoint really quickly where where potential challenge was or if it was with a particular person, because we actually broke it down on the sales side, we broke it down by sales person. How many Opportunities and leads that they get and we broke that down. And then of course, you have your churn, right. How much churn did we get? And was the churn you know, based on. Did we grab a bad door? Do we need to change? What an opportunity is, right? Which we we kind of hit that. We we did really good on our definition of of an opportunity. So now let's talk a little bit about Steve. And I had differences of of how we were going to manage the marketing team. Um, where I was, I kept trimming your budget and I wanted the numbers by, by strategy. And, uh, and we weren't doing it back then. And I remember you and I had a couple of really difficult conversations on how do we go about that? And you had transitioned from reporting from to Steve, my business partner, to me. Um, and it was completely it was like a different, um, a different philosophy and one that you had some struggle with. So talk a little bit about the different philosophies and why mine was was much, much more superior.

Kevin Davidson: Steve Rosenberg, hope you're watching this podcast. So probably for the first four years, three and a half, four years that, um, I was you guys's marketing guy. Um, I was well, more so in the beginning. I was really Steve's assistant. I did whatever he said, no matter what time of the day it was. And we didn't care about how much it cost and what the numbers were and what the goal was or whatever. And as we progressed over the years and the numbers became more important, and we fine tuned the spreadsheet that I was using, it was more of a numbers thing and a math thing, like you said. Um, but Steve was, was was more of a I've got an idea today and I want to know why it's not implemented tomorrow. And he didn't care about the cost. He didn't care about the structure, the procedure, how we were going to do it, what the consequences were, what the goals should have been. That's it wasn't it wasn't in his mindset. It wasn't a bad thing. It was just he didn't remember Steve.

Pete Neubig: I remember Steve looking at one number, right. He looked at how many leads we got, how much money we spent. And he's like, if we double that, we'll double the leads. Early on, if you remember that, right?

Kevin Davidson: But that's not.

Pete Neubig: How opportunities everything. It's just it didn't it didn't work. It didn't work. We ended up ballooning. And I'm pretty open and honest. I think we I think we at one point we were spending about $20,000 a month in, in marketing. And I, and I use the word spending on purpose because we really weren't investing wisely. And, uh, one of the things that that we did early on, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but we we took a shotgun approach and we did a lot of things, but we kind of just checked the box. We didn't go deep on everything.

Kevin Davidson: In the early beginning. We did. Yes.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So talk about why that's important to go deeper and just do less. You said less is more. A couple of times in this interview. So let's talk a little bit about you know why that is.

Kevin Davidson: Because it's it's important because if you're taking a shotgun approach, um, you're basically throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what will stick. And that never works from a large perspective.

Pete Neubig: Especially if you're just doing the bare minimum.

Kevin Davidson: Exactly. Because you don't really know what it is that actually is going to work for you and your company. And so when you drill down on what your target market is, and you drill down on what campaigns that you want to use and only pick a handful and then test and measure them over a given amount of time, you can determine what works and what doesn't, and the ones that work, you keep doing them and the ones that don't, you turn them off and then you add at new campaigns to it, until eventually you go from 100 things to 15 things that actually work. And Steve's approach was a shotgun approach. The more we do, the better results we're going to get. Well, you and I figured out real quick, even though in the beginning I didn't agree with you, we both figured out that that really wasn't working very well. And that's how that's how I ended up transitioning from reporting to him to reporting to you. And I went from doing as many things as I could in a day, in a, in a day, daily days activity to generate as many leads as I could to concentrating on the campaigns that were actually working and capitalizing on those. And you mentioned 20 grand. When it was all said and done, we went from about 27 leads a month, spending 20 grand to I was generating 130 leads a month, and I was only spending $5,000.

Pete Neubig: And I remember.

Kevin Davidson: You. You were a much happier guy.

Pete Neubig: And I remember this, too. We, uh. We actually lowered it to 2500 a month.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: And the leads came down, and you were so mad. It went from, like, 130 to, like, 100. But the opportunities stayed the same or increased. Yeah, about 55 to 60 opportunities. And you were a happy man.

Kevin Davidson: No, I wasn't, because I like the the leads. The leads coming in. But you're right. At the time, I didn't realize that the opportunity percentage was actually more important than the lead count. Yeah, because the opportunity percentage is closer to guaranteed money.

Pete Neubig: That's right, that's right. Uh, you know, I'll give an example. Um, do you remember this? We had that eviction list company. We spent a bunch of money. We got this eviction list. Um, and then you did, like, you did what we had to do to get it working, and then, like we didn't do anything with it. So we got it and we we got the connection and we got the list and all this stuff. And then, um, I started looking at all the money we're spending. I said, what is this? Like? Oh yeah, we did that. And I'm like, well, how many leads do we get from that? Like, I don't know. And I'm like, you're the marketing guy. How do you not know? And what what happened was you checked the box. Steve was happy because we checked the box. Right? We never went deep into the process itself. And when we when we said, you know what, let's stop. Let's let's stop doing everything. Let's just do what are the things that we want to concentrate on, and then let's go deep into it, meaning let's create a whole process for it, right?

Kevin Davidson: Right. Now, the other thing that that we did, Steve and I especially, um, it's important for other property management companies out there to understand that you can't just rely on the lead sources to where you you do something on the internet and you wait for the lead to come in. There's another aspect of marketing, and that's getting yourself and your face out there. Okay, whoever the face of the company is.

Pete Neubig: Becoming the authority figure you're talking.

 

Kevin Davidson: Exactly. Becoming the expert. And, um, Steve did a very good job at that in the beginning. And then, him and I realized that I could do that as well, because I had a marketing background and a marketing degree, and we realized that the one part of a real estate agent's business, because real estate agents was one of our target markets. But one aspect of their business that the brokers don't teach them is how to grow their business. So I became the authority by taking my marketing knowledge. And remember we turned them into C classes.

Pete Neubig: Continuing education courses.

Kevin Davidson: Continuing education classes. So now I'm teaching in real estate offices all over the city. And the next thing you know, our 2020 program is blowing up. And we're getting 5 to 10 referral leads from agents every single month.

Pete Neubig: What would you say? Um, give me, like, 2 or 3 campaigns that you put together that really worked for, for us as a property management firm. The 2020 campaign. Talk a little bit about that. That's our agent referral, which a lot of people have. But how did we go deep on that? We coined it. We named it something. We took C courses. Um, uh, didn't we uh, didn't we let them know we had like a whole web page with it that we let them know about, like, hey, we give you back your property. We, you know, we we, you know, like.

Kevin Davidson: One of the first things that I learned in dealing with agents is agents don't like property management companies, at least at the time, because typical property management companies would steal their clients once they refer them to the property management company, and they, the investor, decided to sell, the property management company would list the properties to they, giving it back to the agent. So we changed that. We were the first property management company to put in the property management agreement that if Stacy Smith from Keller Williams was the referring agent on this property, they would get it back. If Mr. Jones decided to sell the property. And then we combined that with the Agent Alliance 2020 program, which was they got a referral fee for the property management opportunity. If we ended up getting the contract and managing and they got 20% if they let us lease the property. And so when we combine that and then you're right, we created a page on our website that was devoted just to the Agent Alliance 2020 program.

Pete Neubig: And we created a whole marketing program just to get to the agents.

Kevin Davidson: Exactly. And then we, uh, cold call, uh, brokerage offices. Um, we went and sponsored their team meetings and we sponsored their events. And we just got the word out that not only do we give the property back to your agents, guess what? We're a source for marketing to help you grow your business. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: We had, uh, you had three C courses that you created, didn't you? You had them. How to market, um, how to lease your property. And I think the other one was fair housing. Something about some about fair housing or something like that.

Kevin Davidson: Actually, no. They were, uh. So what is it? Good property management company actually do? Okay. Another one was on the Agent Alliance 2020 program. And the third one was, uh, uh, the, uh.

Pete Neubig: Oh, I remember. Why does that guy, why does that agent get all the business?

Kevin Davidson: Exactly.

Pete Neubig: It's the Marketing.

Kevin Davidson: Now, over time, in the later years, I added things like differentiating yourself from the competition, the marketing class. I added the Facebook class I ended up having, when it was all said and done, 7 or 8 classes that I was teaching.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And then we stopped. We didn't have to be the guy that brought the lunch. We were the guy speaking. Exactly right.

Kevin Davidson: And we went from. We went from sponsoring to being the actual hired entertainment.

Pete Neubig: Now, the other thing that we did, I thought was successful. Um, and then we, we kind of pivoted and we went back to what, uh, what worked was the the owner education series. Talk a little bit about how how we created that and what what we what we did there.

Kevin Davidson: So the owner education series was an idea that Steve came up with. And what we did was, is we took our key vendor partners that we worked with, um, from different aspects of the industry and, um, put together a event to our. Steve was the keynote speaker. Okay. He was the that he was the, um, what what's the word? He was the the main attraction of the event. Um, but we also had our, our vendor partners that were, uh, working with us at the time. They were also there and we would have a discussion about real estate, all things real estate, property management. And it gave the audience an opportunity to ask the professionals in the industry questions that they had about either property management, getting into property management, real estate, whatever it was.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I do remember when we first started, it was really just for our owners. It was in our office. And, uh, we would have either a client speak or we'd have one of our vendors speak or me or Steve spoke, and it was small. It was like 20, 25 people. It was before zoom is when everybody.

Kevin Davidson: In the office.

Pete Neubig: Yes, in the office. We remember on that fifth floor we had that.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah. Okay. Now I remember that.

Pete Neubig: And so the objective really was to build relationships with our owner clients. And it could bring somebody. And the objective was to reduce churn, build relationships, and then get more of their business.

Kevin Davidson: Right.

Pete Neubig: Steve and Kevin get a hold of it. Next thing you know, we're at a hotel. Every month we got ten vendors sponsoring the event. And, um, the challenge that I remember having is that it was it was it's it's a lot to put on an event like that. Even a small one in, in the town. Um, and we would get about a hundred people there. But what, remember.

Kevin Davidson: Which was never enough people for Steve.

Pete Neubig: Never enough people. So Steve likes top line numbers. Steve liked revenue. Steve liked how many people seats. I like bottom line numbers. I like what's our profit? And I like how many buying units are in the seat. And so the challenge that we had was we'd get a lot of people there that would drink our booze, eat our food, and then I would ask Kevin, I would ask you, how many leads did we get? And at first you're like, oh, I don't know, right? Because Steve didn't then, it didn't ask about that. He just wanted to know how many people were going to be there. And so this goes back to don't do something just to do it. We waste remember we had our property managers there. I mean, people working late at night. They have kids. They we ask them to be at this event. You spent hours upon hours putting this together. Our vendors had to come do stuff. And and at the end of the day, if you don't get the leads and the opportunities and you're not making business, it's not worth it. So we actually ended up going back the old way, if I recall, and we just said, you know what? We're just going to do it with our owners.

Kevin Davidson: You remember now, Steve, if you're watching the reason it ended up growing into the hotel thing was because of Steve.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Davidson: He wanted.

Pete Neubig: And it was a great look. You got to take shots.

Kevin Davidson: Right?

Pete Neubig: But the problem was he would have we would have kept doing it if we didn't look at the numbers. And so that's really, you know, I keep going back to the numbers. The numbers, the numbers. Marketing is numbers. Sales is numbers. It's not top line. It's bottom line. How many units, how many opportunities am I getting? What's my conversion rate? How much money am I making? And then I want to lead into this because the last piece that I asked you to do was how do we determine how many leads, opportunities and how much money are we spending per strategy? So talk about how you did that, because that was a missing piece for many years for us. And you figured it out. How did you figure it out?

Kevin Davidson: Well, all I did was is is I realized that I could we could take the same concept that we did from looking at the company's results from the top down and drill down and do the same thing. So if I wanted to know how many leads and opportunities I was getting in as a total, why couldn't I look at them from per campaign? So if I was running Facebook ads, how many leads was I getting from the Facebook ads campaign itself? How many were opportunities and what was the conversion rate? And then take it another step further. And how many doors were they closing from the Facebook leads and what was the cost?

Pete Neubig: But you you have we had to have a CRM at that point. Right. Because didn't you connect our CRM with the Facebook ads with our website? Yeah.

Kevin Davidson: Yeah, yeah.

Pete Neubig: So the. Right. So you had to build a there was a lot of building that you had to do.

Kevin Davidson: Well, you remember I spent three months on the, um, uh, HubSpot onboarding program putting that whole thing together. Um, I was the only one that was doing it, and you and Steve were just waiting for me to get it done, and I put it all together. But you're right. I connected the website, I connected the social media. I connected everything that I could electronically to where when the lead came in, I would get notified, but it would drop directly into the CRM. And then weekly or monthly you would say, hey Kevin, when we had our meeting, how many leads did we get? Da da da da da. I could just punch in a couple of hit a couple of keystrokes and I could spit out a report.

Pete Neubig: Yep. Yep. And then, uh, you ended up having to work with Derek in our financing department, our accounting department. And we had to set up different classes in our accounting and our QuickBooks to say, okay, because we wanted to know per strategy. So every strategy we had, we had a corresponding class in QuickBooks for that strategy. Right. So website, um, you know, pay per click, uh, Facebook ad.

Kevin Davidson: Everything was there.

Pete Neubig: You know, owner education series. Everything was there. So then you would get that information from Derek, and then you would punch it into your spreadsheet on how much we spent in each strategy. And then the numbers just we had all the numbers.

Kevin Davidson: So what I did was I exported the numbers for a given amount of time from the CRM. I asked Derek for the numbers for the for the expense numbers and revenue numbers from the same time period, and I plugged them all into this massive spreadsheet that told you and Steve and me Exactly where the sales and the marketing department was from incoming leads to outgoing doors. And you and Steve could ask me on any given day of the week where we were at with sales and marketing, and all I had to do was pull up the spreadsheet and there it was right there. And you guys really didn't have to manage that because I did it.

Pete Neubig: Yep. Yep. I, I gotta be honest with you, um, when I, when I got sales and marketing under me and Steve was kind of doing his, doing his, uh, coaching thing, and he was kind of, he kind of like, elevated outside of Empire. And I, I became CEO of, of all the departments. I didn't know anything about sales and marketing, and I knew too much about property management. And so I, you know, I didn't micromanage my marketing guy or my sales guy because I couldn't. But what I did do is I asked for the certain numbers. I wanted the numbers a certain way. Right? I wanted to know the lead per strategy, the strategy. The cost per lead per strategy, the percentage of opportunity. I want to know all that stuff. And then on the sales side, I want to know the conversion rate, the average Daus. Right. The average dollar, the average dollar amount, you know, um, and then, you know, obviously the conversion rate. And I would just look at the numbers and I would manage by numbers, which, you know, poor Margo, she was running my operations department. I was in her business all the time, like I micromanaged her. And for her, her experience working for me was different than your experience because you're like, oh, man, Pete just lets me do my thing. I mean, I never looked at your copy. Didn't care. I don't care what the Facebook ad looks like. I don't care what you know what the CE course looks like. All I cared about was the bottom line. Did it get the. Did it get us opportunities? And, uh, Steve cared about how things looked. Right? You had one one little comma out of place, and and he was.

Kevin Davidson: And I get a phone call at 3:30, 4:00 in the morning before you went to work out.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And I mean, so I think the first thing is like, you know, once you hire the marketing person or company, whatever, you got to kind of trust them. Trust but verify. Steve always said that and I trust but verify I trusted Kevin, but I verified almost weekly where where are the numbers? You know, so if.

Kevin Davidson: You're do you remember the. Do you remember my spreadsheet?

Pete Neubig: I do, I do remember it.

Kevin Davidson: I actually still have a copy of it, and I use it in my C classes now when I teach agents. But my spreadsheet was one spreadsheet, one file, but there was like 10 or 15 tabs, and each tab was a different aspect of the marketing and sales department that you wanted numbers reported on.

Pete Neubig: Yep. So all right, so I'm going to ask you this last question before we go to commercial break here. If I'm a property management firm and I'm just starting out and I have very little funds and I don't have a lot of presence out there. Authority, whatever. Um, What? What? Give me 1 or 2 things that you would recommend that. Let's put your coaching hat on. If you're coaching me and I'm starting out my property management firm, I don't have a lot of funds. What are the two three things that I should do to start getting leads?

Kevin Davidson: Um, well, in today's day and age, if you're not active on social media and my go to social media are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. And then also you need a Google My Business page and a YouTube. Okay. If you don't have those or you're not using those. And when I say using those, I mean posting to them three times a day.

Pete Neubig: Wow. Okay.

Kevin Davidson: No excuses. Okay. Because the name of the game is be being known as the expert. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. And if they never see you and they never hear from you, that will never happen. Okay. Number two, property management companies want to work with real estate agents. So bring the real estate agents or brokers. Some value stop asking them for referrals just because you manage properties. And even though agents love money. If you want to get in front of a larger crowd of agents, go to the brokerage, not directly to the agent.

Pete Neubig: Or the title company. Right? The title company.

Kevin Davidson: The title companies exactly. Go to the brokerages. Go to the title companies. Get connected with mortgage companies. Get connected with home warranty companies because those people, those companies target market are also the same agents that you're trying to go after. All right. And third, but not least, get yourself out there, get your face out there, get somebody out there as the face of the company. And I tell agents all the time, I don't care if you think you're the expert, you just have to convince people that you want to work with that you're an expert, okay? When they call you, you'll figure it out. But you have to get out there. There's too much competition, and there's too many people out there trying to get for the exact same lead and the exact same door. So you have to differentiate yourself, whatever that is. Get out there and differentiate yourself and do it via social media website, video. Because right now the number one place to market yourself is Google. The number the number two is YouTube. And the number one way to market any product or service today is by video.

Pete Neubig: Excellent. Excellent information. All right Kevin, we're going to take a quick commercial break. And then we're going to come back with a really quick lightning round because we are over time because I can talk to you all day about marketing.

Kevin Davidson: No problem.

Pete Neubig: I think other people find this fascinating as well. We'll be right back, everybody. All right. Welcome back everybody Kevin Davidson, you on the lightning round. Are you ready for the lightning round?

Kevin Davidson: I don't know what this is, but okay.

Pete Neubig: All right let's let's see here I'm going to ask you a few questions here. What is one piece of advice you would give someone just starting out in PM?

Kevin Davidson: Uh, don't worry about what anybody else thinks. Just market your business your way.

Pete Neubig: Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Kevin Davidson: Excuse me.?

Pete Neubig: Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Kevin Davidson: Not in the property management world I was in. No.

Pete Neubig: Me? Um, what was your first job?

Kevin Davidson: My first job, um, I was, I cut lawns when I was 14 years old. I had my own lawn mower, my own weed eater, my own gas can. And I walked around and knocked on doors in my neighborhood, and I gave no lie. I gave 100% of all the funds that I raised or made cutting grass to my mother to help pay bills.

Pete Neubig: And you said you're not a sales guy, I guess.

Kevin Davidson: Uh, yeah.

Pete Neubig: Time goes to desperate measures. What's a book you recommend for people to read?

Kevin Davidson: Probably the Art of the deal by Donald Trump.

Pete Neubig: Okay. What's one challenge you're facing in your business?

Kevin Davidson: One challenge I'm facing in my business is market trends right now. Every week it's a different week. Every week the number of contracts I get comes and goes. And the main reason for it, there's two days on the market, and real estate insurance is astronomical right now.

Pete Neubig: What is something that most people don't know about you?

Kevin Davidson: That, I'm a 55 year old, bald headed, heavy metal freak that plays guitar.

Pete Neubig: Uh, prefer dogs or cats?

Kevin Davidson: Cats.

Pete Neubig: Cat guy. Kevin Davidson. You are now off the lightning round. Thank you so much.

Kevin Davidson: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Pete Neubig: If somebody is, uh, wants to talk to you about marketing or just want to pick your brain, can they get in touch with you? And if so, how so?

Kevin Davidson: Of course. Everybody knows my cell phone number is (832) 654 0527. Or you can reach out to me via email at kevin.davidson@stewart.com and of course you can find me all over social media.

Pete Neubig: And if you listen to this and you want to join NARPM because you're like, man, this is great information. I want to learn. I want to connect with other property managers out there. Go to NARPM, narpm.org or call them at (800) 782-3452. And if you can't afford a Kevin Davidson full time marketing person, but you want to hire maybe somebody remotely, you can find people remotely that can do social media, they can do some SEO. They can they can actually post for you, give us a call at VPM Solutions. Go to vpmsolutions.com or email me directly pete@vpmsolutions.com. Thanks a lot Kev.

Kevin Davidson: Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity, buddy. Thank you.