A Podcast | Bryan Jenkins

Pete Neubig: [00:00:50] Welcome back everybody. Uh, as promised, I have my good buddy Bryan Jenkins here, Bryan and I, uh, Bryan. Well, first of all, Bryan, thanks so much for being here today, brother.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:01:00] Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. I've always looked forward to conversations with you.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:04] So Bryan and I served on the board of directors together for one year. We had an overlapping when we were RVPs, and we've forged a friendship since then. So Bryan and I have been, I'd say, pretty decent buddies since about 2017, 2018, time frame around there. So Bryan, thanks again for making time on your, uh, for the NARPM podcast because you are my friend, one of the best kept secrets in NARPM. You're like one of these. You're like a stealth bomber. You're, like, under the radar, but you have so much knowledge. So I feel I feel, you know, very fortunate to be able to get you on here and pull some of that, uh, out of you. So tell us a little bit. Tell, you know, for those who do not know, you tell them a little bit about your PM journey where you've been and and where you are now.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:01:51] Yeah. I'm a, uh, 24-year veteran of property management.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:57] Battle tested.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:01:59] Yeah. Started back in 2000 as an investor. Uh, and then my partner and I, we bought a bunch of homes to do corporate leasebacks to, uh, corporate relocatees in the Birmingham market. Um, and we were self managing our own portfolio, so I was running all the operations for that. Uh, with a small team and then, uh, actually real estate company, largest in Alabama at the time, that's now a Berkshire Hathaway company, uh, approached us about potentially purchasing their their rental division. That sounds grandiose, but it was 109 absentee owners, even though they were the biggest real estate company, I think they were facing some of the challenges that real estate companies face when they try to do a property management division in-house. I think there was some distrust or disconnect with the communications aspects of onboarding clients to their internal service, so we, made the decision over a weekend and absorbed their properties with ours. We had 52 at the time, so we hit the ground running basically with a 161 single family homes, all scattered site. And and then we rolled out publicly, um, January 1 of '04 as AHI Properties and kind of grew that portfolio of about uh, um, ultimately from get go 21 years, uh, working that up and then opening four additional branches. So we, we had four markets in Alabama, all the major metros. And then we had, uh, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Um, and people ask me all the time was like, well, how'd you get out to Oklahoma? What what did that look like? And for us, um, because we already had brick and mortar footprints and offices with my partners, corporate housing company that my wife Cheri runs, and she still runs it to this day. I think she's in her 35th year. Um, we found it easy to open up branches because we already had the brick and mortar and just adding local talent and technology and processes to that. So, um, and then anytime we had an investor that was purchasing property, um, and not ones and twosies, but ultimately, uh, institutional clients that were purchasing blocks of properties, we would open a new office with them and then grow the retail office around that institutional client. Um, so that worked. Well, we we went from that 161. At our height, we were just over 1500 doors under management. And then in 2021, I joined Pure and sold AHI Properties to Pure and started working with Pure growing and institutional management vertical. Um, and I actually worked with DD, um, you know, DD, well, um.

Pete Neubig: [00:04:49] Current treasurer of NARPM, uh, NARPM National.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:04:52] So we grew that out of, uh, out of Non-existence into existence today. So, um, worked for Pure for almost 3 years. And, uh, and then along the way, uh, we started our consulting business, uh, PM business implementers. And from that, uh, the reason we got started with that ultimately, is knowing that operators have a hard time of implementation. You know, if you've gone to conference, you come back with 3 or 4 great ideas you want to implement into your business. It's often a bandwidth thing. You don't have the time to do it. Uh, you may be operating with a small team and not have the team to actually focus on the implementation and getting that taken care of in a prompt manner. So, um, so we have, uh, currently working with some clients. We've been working with clients for several months, uh, to where we've been helping them implement, uh, new systems, new software components, new processes, and helping them do any, any of that and a lot of additional stuff We've helped with website development and content writing, um, all the way down to business licensing, helping them get properly licensed, real estate commission for start ups and split offs and uh, um, just getting the bare bones of, uh, basic business in place. So it's been it's been a lot of fun.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:15] So I know excuse me, I know, like, when we come back from a conference, you're all jazzed up. You got 1000 ideas, and then you, uh, you have this plan that you're going to implement all this stuff, and you get home, and then, uh, as Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth, and then you kind of get punched in the mouth because you're away for, you know, 4 or 5 days from the office. And there's a long list of, of calls to call back and test to do. And, and then your team is, is kind of already overworked, overwhelmed. And every time you come back with another idea, they just kind of go, oh my goodness. All right. Another one. And and then they don't have the time to implement, even though if you implement something, it will save them a bunch of time or they don't have the personality profile to implement. So, um, you guys built this thing to really help people go from reactionary to proactive. So let's say I just get back from National and I have all these different ideas. Talk to me a little bit about, um, without hiring PM business implementers. Talk to me about what you would tell your, you know, these clients or these people, these company owners, what the steps would be to actually get something implemented, because, I mean, so many people at Broker owner, they have all these things they can implement. And I meet them at NARPM National in October, like, you know, six months later and they haven't implemented anything. What is your what's your you know, tell me. Give me the formula.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:07:49] Yeah. Well, you know, largely you know, I'll base this on my own experience. Um, because I actually, from my start in real estate to when I actually came across NARPM, um, was there was a decade in which I self-manage and learned from my own mistakes, and viewed cross-town competitors as competition and, uh, didn't work with them, didn't try to refer business back and forth and really didn't develop those friendships like I should have been doing. Um, obviously NARPM changed all that. We, my partner and I, we we took our, um, our CFO with us to Dallas back in 2011 looking for software solution because we'd been using a server based product. We went down and we wanted to talk to 4 software companies at the same time, and we did that, and we ended up signing with AppFolio. But out of that conference, you know, I remember vividly being on the airplane, headed back to Birmingham from Dallas and us having a conversation and asking each other like, what the hell was that? Um, you know, everybody's giving away their secret sauce and their family recipes of success. And, you know, the more I attended additional events and got plugged into the Atlanta chapter ultimately, um, and then kudos. I don't know if you, you know, Cindy Rampley. Um, but Cindy was president of the Atlanta chapter at the time, and she's now, um, one of the real estate commissioners in the state of Georgia. Um, but Cindy actually challenged me to, uh, to be on one of her committees and be a committee chair, uh, my first year in the chapter. And I chose that chapter because, um, Mike Nelson was there and Robert Locke. And just from a little bit of conversation with several members of NARPM Dallas and after, uh, I knew that those guys were successful and I wanted want to learn from the best in the business. And so that's why I. There was no there's still no chapter to this day in, in Alabama.

Pete Neubig: [00:09:59] How far is it to Atlanta?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:10:01] It was a three hour commitment for me. Each direction to go and I.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:06] So for those for those of you who are like, I can't get to my local chapter because they're north of town and I don't want to drive through downtown. This man drove six hours basically to go to just to go to an hour meeting.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:10:19] Yeah, once a month, once a month. I'd make all the board meetings, all the chapter meetings.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:23] So. All right. So I think the moral of the story here is getting getting involved helps. But what I want to do is I really want to pin down like.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:10:33] Yeah. And back to your back to your question in pinning that down, um, what I would do, uh, in what I got out of that and I was leading up to the education component of it. Once you understand, uh, more about how you should structure your business, have an honest conversation. You know, sit your your managers down. If you've got managers under, you really have a, um, have an open dialect to where you guys can communicate and evaluate the business. And once I started learning to do that and figuring out what our pain points were, and that's what I would recommend to people, it's like, you know, identify your pain points, what's causing you the biggest issues? What's keeping you from going on vacation? What's keeping you totally engaged while you're at conference? Not able to step away and focus on conference, right. Because of stuff going on back home and and prioritizing. If you if you want to implement things, there is a time and a place to do that. And it's not always a good idea that your conference may not be your best solution to come back and implement that immediately. You may want to focus on some of your processes, getting your KPIs in order.

Pete Neubig: [00:11:47] You know, Bryan, you bring up a good point when you say like, what are your pain points? Most people that I know of when they go to a conference, they really don't have a game plan. I like what you said when you went to Dallas. You you knew your challenge was, I need a software. And you went and you evaluated 4 softwares. And then the cool thing is you made a decision. Like you literally walked away, made a decision. Right. And you implemented that decision. My guess is probably the next week what I, what I would say. Well, let me ask you, um, do you do the, um, what's it called when you have like a, uh, um, you go into, um, you go into the, the conference with like, here's my list. This is my this is like, SMART goals. That's what I'm thinking of. Do you do you do the whole SMART goal thing? And do you think it's it's smart to actually have goals prior to the conference versus like when you get excited at the conference and you hear these buzzwords and then you want to implement something that you really didn't even have a plan for before you went to the conference. Does that make sense?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:12:51] It does. That's exactly where I found myself is, you know, the conferences thereafter, whether it was broker owner or national and in some of the regional conferences were still in play back then is I would go with those SMART goals and I would go with the idea of there were there were people, as I learned, who people were right within the industry. Um, I would seek those people out because if if I was talking to as to say, I'm just going to throw Tenant Turner out as an example, if I was considering implementing Tenant Turner and I'd had a discovery call with Tenant Turner, and I liked the concept of it, I would still rely on Mike. Hey, who who are some some of your users of your product? Right. And then I would seek those folks out. And today I can pick up the phone and call them or, you know, they know who I am. Um, but back then, I had to seek them him out at conference and figure out, okay, can I can I borrow, beg, borrow five, ten minutes of your time? Because I really want to ask your opinion and I want to get your valued input on how this is working for you. What are some of the pros and cons? And that's the value of NARPM, one of the many values. But um, just the ability for people to share and share openly and always tell a vendor, you know, the best thing you can do is if you if you want to be successful in NARPM, um, you get some people that are subscribing to your service and get those testimonials and allow them to be your mouthpiece, because that's what we're seeking. Just like I sought out Robert Lock and Mike Nelson, uh, in the early days. You know, I still talk to those guys on a regular basis. I talked to Robert at least once or twice a month. Um, because I value their opinion. But I want to hear the highs and the lows and then make an educated decision from there. Do we want.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:44] so I think the big takeaway if you listen to this is, you know, we got NARPM National coming up and you have Broker Owner and you have all these other conferences that we go to. I think the first thing is, you know, go there with the with those SMART goals, right. Specific Measurable Achievable Results based and Time, Time based, I think. Right. So so right. The goal with those with with the SMART acronym. This way when you go to the conference you don't get caught up in like kind of like the buzzwords or you don't get caught up in what somebody else is excited about, right? Like, I know, like automation is big right now. If you're not looking for an automation tool and then you go to a conference and everybody's talking about LeadSimple or APTLY or something else, you know, there's no reason for you to sign up and start saying, that's what I want to do next. When that wasn't even on your radar before, like two days before.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:15:34] Don't sign up for something just for the sake of signing up for it so you can say, yes, I use LeadSimple. Well, do you really use LeadSimple as an example.

Pete Neubig: [00:15:43] Right. So...

Bryan Jenkins: [00:15:44] Because what we find is if you talk to there are a lot of good operators out there that are, you know, their, their implementation, uh, you know, they could have 4 or 5 things they're trying to implement and they're not fully implemented. They're they're running at 60 or 70% implemented. They're not taking full advantage. And the best example of that is property management software. How many how many operators, you know, that have dynamic software that they're they're using 60%.

Pete Neubig: [00:16:13] But yet they're going to go buy some other pieces of software because, you know, they wanted they needed to do X, Y, and Z. Meanwhile, their software could do it if they just if they just dove in a little bit. Yeah.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:16:24] That's included in the money that they're already spending on the software and they're not having to, uh, you know, spend extra money. 

Pete Neubig: [00:16:29] Okay. So so now I'm a property manager. Let's say I had my Smart goals. I find the vendors that I'm looking for. I find the people, which I think that's a great, uh, that's a great key point there. Find the people that have done what it is you're doing, right? If you're at 300 doors and you want to get to 500 doors, and one of your Smart goals is to find 2 or 3 ways to grow your business, we'll find those people, figure out how they grew their business, and then that becomes, you know, basically a potential project. But now I go home and I got those 300 units and I, you know, my people are working late. They're they're working, you know, weekends. I'm working weekends. Um, how do you like how do you even go about this? Like, how do you even, you know, eat this elephant, so to speak? Because it does get a little overwhelming. Um, when you get back.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:17:21] It does. Um, and again, you know, and it's, it's not a one and done to identify your pain points. You have to do that with regularity, um, at least quarterly. Um, a lot of, you know, toward the end of air properties, we were doing that on a monthly basis. I would, you know, with branch managers.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:38] And you'd be able to solve monthly. You'd be able to solve problems in a month when you got down to it?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:17:42] Identifying them and then measuring progress toward successfully solving those issues.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:48] Got it.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:17:48] And many times it took multiple months in order to do that.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:51] Yeah.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:17:52] And then the other, you know, the other piece that I was able to do particularly, you know, going from, I'm going to call it from 600 doors to 1000 doors and, um, you know, hiring the right staff to be able to scale because the goal was to be above a thousand. My first goal, above a thousand was 1200 doors. And in order to get there, I hired early to be able to do that instead of stressing the team, uh, on the backside. And, you know, there's different philosophies with that, right?

Pete Neubig: [00:18:24] Yeah. My brain first goes to okay. Yeah, you can do that. But now I, if I'm just making a small profit now I just basically lose that profit. Right.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:18:34] Right. That's right.

Pete Neubig: [00:18:35] So I'm guessing that's the biggest challenge, but obviously the better the better is you just you get to grow into that person. And you don't. Your team's not stressed, so you don't lose. Good team. That'd be the negative of it. Correct?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:18:48] Right. That's right, that's right. So and generally speaking, you know, the scaling aspect and hiring that person early was usually in a business development role. And being able to build out that network for that person, which takes a little bit of time. Right. Um, and ultimately, you know, one of the first things that we did in regard to that was to build out individual lead funnels coming in and working with investment networks and going out there and, you know, beating the bush, so to speak, and meeting and greeting with people and, and making the right contacts and ultimately establishing those lead funnels in conjunction with your normal organic lead generation, both inbound and outbound. And then, you know, ultimately allowing that revenue to pick up. And then, you know, through NARPM, learning the importance of of the the KPI for revenue per door, understanding what your average rent is, what your revenue per door is, identifying your ideal client. So there's some things you've got to do in the mix in order to allow you to scale up, to have the additional resources. And then once we had that, um, we started thinking about that shift from reactive to proactive. So once we got the ops under control and I had, you know, I had a client that was a friend a long time ago. Tell me, um, I saw a guy out in public, and he told me that he goes, you know, the only time I hear from your team is when they need something. You know, there's a problem. They need money, and that really stuck with me. And it was off of that one conversation that I pivoted into that role of proactive versus reactive, knowing that the number one complaint, property management, is lack of communication.

Pete Neubig: [00:20:27] Yep.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:20:28] So we started, uh, focusing on those 3 or 4 items twice a year that we would focus on and implementing. And if I came back with four items. Ultimately, at the end of the year, I would have implemented, you know, 4x2 is eight. I would have implemented six of the eight items. And that's that was our plan.

Pete Neubig: [00:20:48] And each item is saving your team time. It's working towards proactive. It's things of that nature, yeah?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:20:55] That's exactly right. And then we got to where in the communications piece, um, we started developing things like webinars quarterly, um, for our clients. And we would open it up. Reservations only a lot of people have issues with. Well, I don't want to have all my clients on there. If somebody's going to speak out and say something negative about our company, you can control that. I mean, if if Covid got...

Pete Neubig: [00:21:18] Yeah, you can get. It where they can't, they can't say anything. They can just ask questions. They can't really.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:21:23] Yeah. So we would do invite only and RSVP. They had to RSVP. We know who's coming in advance. And then we would do a thing at the end where we used this uh, thing called Wheel of Names. And we you had to be in attendance to actually win the prize at the end, but we would spin it, land on somebody and give them free management for a month or, you know, whatever you want to throw out there. Um, and then we would record those and then we would push them out to all of our clients. And, and what we focused on in those is we would focus on the changes that we were making and the why. Uh, back from my military days. Um, you know, my last stint in the military, because I did two branches, Navy and Army, and in between, like the Navy, when I was in the Navy, it was just go do this, don't ask questions. By the time I was only out for less than a year, and I got back in and went into the army, but my army commanders were always explaining, giving the why, right? Why we're doing this mission, why we're training for this. And so I took that mentality and applied it to clients, and we would take an hour long webinar and talk to three of those points, you know, 7 or 8 minutes and identify what the benefit was to them, what the benefit was to the resident, what the benefit was to our team and how it made us a better property management company.

Pete Neubig: [00:22:44] Yeah, I think I think explaining the why is is really important, not just for clients, but for your team as well, right? Because they have to get the buy in, especially if you're coming back and saying, hey, I want to implement this new process or policy or whatever. Right. This new software, the team..

Bryan Jenkins: [00:23:01] When you start saving them time, you start saving them those phone calls that are coming in that are negative and creating a positive environment, along with what you're doing with team building and that sort of thing that changes the mentality in the buy in of the team and that that's important. And toward the end of that cycle, I got to where, uh, learned this at another NARPM conference from an operator. It's like, you know, if you don't have the bandwidth, identify somebody within your organization. Uh, for instance, if you're implementing Property Meld, I mean, what I did was I took one of my, um, tech facing maintenance guys. Uh, they really love that kind of thing and put him in charge of implementation. And he ran with it, and he's a bourbon guy. And I bought him his favorite bourbon as a reward at the end of all of it.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:46] Nice.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:23:46] So, you know, just taking that and then doing that as you implement things and making your team part of that, and that creates much more buy in.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:54] That was, uh, that was the last hat that I took off at Empire. I was the I was the I call myself the implementation specialist, but the implementer and I finally gave it to a young kid who is now my business partner here on VPM. But Ross was my sales manager, believe it or not. And he. I knew he had the capacity. Um, and he had like the personality type. And he became the implementer. And we implemented, uh, HubSpot. Uh, we were doing automation with HubSpot before LeadSimple was available, was an option or APTLY was an option. And uh, boy oh boy, man, you get, you know, new software introduced a new software. Your team does not embrace it for the most part. And so he had a but he he did it. He, he um, he implemented HubSpot and automation and tasking and, um, and ticketing into our operation. And the operation took another huge leap forward, uh, leveling up in being able for us to manage properties more effectively and become, uh, proactive. So let's talk a little bit about PM business implementers.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:25:04] Okay.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:04] Now, this is uh, you've you're doing this with DD Lee, who we mentioned earlier, who's the treasurer right now of NARPM. And you guys decided to to create this partnership. Uh, why, what was the main reason? What was the main driver behind it?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:25:20] Well, again, it's both of us have a heart for giving back to the industry. And I think, uh, you know, my mantra is always, uh, you know, rising tide raises all ships, right? So I'd like to see everybody wanting more professional leveled up, as you said earlier. Playing field. Because I believe if you're doing something right, your competitors are going to rise to that level and do it with you and raise the entire standard within the industry. Um, you know where we are in the industry today. Uh, it's much different, obviously, after '08. Um, things changed. Money started coming into the space. Um, there's a lot more focus on on the space from an investment standpoint. So you have, you know, you have your accidental landlords, but you also have your intentional investors and you have your institutional guys. Um, and we always leveled up to the institutional level because their demands were much higher. And they they required a certain nuance and understanding for asset level management. And once you start to incorporate some of that into your operation, um, it benefits your customers. And, yeah, all your clients, uh, and really start having everything forward facing toward that education level. And then once, as you said, once you take that step forward, uh, with your company by implementing your systems and becoming more efficient, uh, it's not necessarily so that people don't have to interact with clients and customers. It's the exact opposite. To give you more time to be able to turn around and put that back into your business, communicate more, and like for us, what we did for we had a three year podcast that our business development and I did uh, manager and I did together and...

Pete Neubig: [00:27:06] Well, Jonathan Cook right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:27:08] That's right. And Jonathan, Jonathan's great. He's got the I mean the personality for it. He's he's just wonderful. Um, but we did the podcast and ultimately what happened, what we saw happen in our business was we didn't have the we weren't taking the calls shopping us on price. We didn't have to justify our service for what we were charging. What we found is people were viewing our company as the property management experts write, experts in our field instead of the hired help. And once you make that transition and people come to you for your expertise like they would for a CPA or an attorney, um, a specialty that that's a...

Pete Neubig: [00:27:47] Yeah, you actually do yourself a disservice if you discount or you or you have a lower price because they're like, they're expecting to pay higher because of the expertise.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:27:57] That's right. That's right. They expect to pay higher. And if you discount it you're you're inviting the wrong client. That's always going to question and try to beat you up on price on every level. And unfortunately I learned that lesson early on. But I also learned coming into finding NARPM, uh, in '11, everything that we've gone through, I knew after '08, which is really ten in our market, I had to diversify the portfolio, and I had to focus on international investors and institutional clients and, uh, and nothing big. I mean, I didn't want to lose a client and have to shut an office down because I've lost a client. You know, that's not fun.

Pete Neubig: [00:28:34] Yeah. No.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:28:35] So I, I purposely my partner and I made the decision. We wanted to focus on small institutional clients, small funds. And, you know, we bring in 2 or 300 doors with a new client, which was great. But if you lost 2 or 300 doors, it didn't cripple your business or cause you to have to lay off staff and that sort of thing. So we just repositioned and we'd have the next one teed up and ready to go. So, um, so that's, you know, that is ultimately when you get to that. And we weren't perfect. We were just always working to be better and to be more informative and to actually have our clients actually seek us out for our expertise. But at the same time, using the podcast, using the webinars that we recorded as educational library pieces. Right? So if you're talking to somebody on the phone, they've got a question. Oh now Tenant Turner, yeah. Yeah. We we've got an episode where we talk to James for 40 minutes on a podcast. We'd love to send that to you. And that'll give you a very in depth analysis based on the questions that we ask them. And just taking that, taking our processes and just being open with it.

Pete Neubig: [00:29:41] So we're up against the clock here. But I want to talk like super high level. Give me like a checklist right, of what you would look at or what you would tell people if they want to go from reactionary to proactive because you've given a lot of like, here's some how to's, some tools to use, but like super high level, like for example, like the first thing that you would look at I would think is like your policies, right? Do you have them or not have them? Are they documented? Are they the right policy? Like is it like how you feel that day. Like like you know. Right. So like so kind of take me through that checklist that you mentally say, okay, I'm going to look at the policy for like look at the policy first. Then the next thing would be what would you look at next?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:30:28] Yeah, kind of reverse engineering a little bit, but, um, processes is first,

Pete Neubig: [00:30:34] Okay.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:30:34] Look at processes. Do you have them documented?

Pete Neubig: [00:30:38] Yeah. Do you actually know what actually is going on? Right. In your business, right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:30:42] Exactly. Does your team know what's going on, or do they have to come to you for every little thing. Right. So and there were days that, that that occurred and you never get any peace. And you've been there. Uh, I've been there. And then the education component of your team and your team allocation. Right. Do you have the right person in the right seat? And be be quick with those decisions. Don't don't let them drag out. I talked to somebody the other day that had the wrong PM and the wrong seat for three years before they made the decision to get rid of them, and that could be detrimental and can really tarnish your your business to where it's not growing. Um, so just make sure your staffing levels are correct. Um, you know, you don't want to hire too early. There's always that balance. I mentioned it earlier. It's an individual business decision when it comes down to it and where you project your growth over the next 12 or 24 months. Um, but ultimately you want to make sure you're structured. And I started off departmental and I realized what departmental was in transition.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:44] And Bryan, you when you when you say look at the processes, I think you said this earlier, but I want to reiterate, you're not telling everybody to look at every process. You're trying to look at the 1 or 2 processes that is causing the most challenges in the in the organization. That's the ones you start with first, right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:32:00] That's the ones you start with first. Ultimately, you're going to look at all your processes within the.

Pete Neubig: [00:32:04] Over time though, right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:32:06] But figure out if you know, if onboarding new clients is a big pain point for you. Look at that process, work that process out. Uh, and one way I did it, um, you know, I, I hired an intern for the summer, and she came in and, and actually interviewed all my staff and asked ask him what they did in their job and documented everything. And that's where we we started with a lot of raw information. We refined that down, and we created job descriptions for each of our positions and and actually publish them. And then we utilize those going forward as we would hire and transition. And it made it a lot easier for me to move from departmental to portfolio based. Um, because as I was opening a new office, because of their limited amount of inventory, I found myself naturally going into the pod, the pod structure, and then relying on my main branch to provide back end services. So, you know, my first hire, uh, it's going to be a property manager. Property manager is going to wear a lot of hats. Right. But during that time we're coordinating maintenance from our main branch and so on. So as you scale up, you can add more bodies and build out your pods. Um, and then.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:19] You better have really good detailed job descriptions and you need to know what they're supposed to be doing. They need to know. And then you've mentioned KPIs a couple of times already. So I know you're passionate about that. You have to have the right KPI. So you you know, and they know if they're doing a good job, then, um, it's like when you are looking at processes, you're not trying to build automation for step one. Step one, you're just trying to document the existing.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:33:47] Document, the process you get the automation...

Pete Neubig: [00:33:49] Then you tweak it right. Then you tweak it to the way you want, like the process is happening. Um, probably not the way you think it is most likely. Right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:33:59] And honestly, it can happen one way, one day and another way the next.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:04] Right? So we got to have a process that has consistency again. Yeah. And then um, and consistency matters because you, you literally because of fair housing and because you want to give like McDonald's is the same all around the world because of consistency. Right. You know what you're getting.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:34:20] That's exactly what's stuck in my mind because I started picking up clients because of the multiple branches. I started picking up clients that had properties at multiple MSAs, right? I wanted them to have the same experience in Birmingham as they did in Huntsville, as they did in Mobile. And in order to do that, our processes had to be tight.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:37] Yeah. And, uh, so then, um, the way I did it and I'm going to ask you before we hit the commercial break is, um, what I did is before I did automation, I threw bodies at the kind of the problem. Right. So I documented the process. It was super manual. So I hired a lot of remote team members, which obviously I believe in because I create a whole business around that. And then I built in automation. And when I, when I built in the automation I had what you had mentioned earlier is I had hired people for growth. They just were remote and I actually needed them. And then automation allowed me to manage more doors per people. And so once I had the automation, now I had ability to to to grow. Is that kind of the the steps that you and take when you go into a client?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:35:29] It is and you know, part of it is, you know, during a discovery call is being honest and being open. We, you know, we enter an NDA with, with our clients before they become clients. And we just encourage people to be very open about everything that they have or don't have and allow us to evaluate it and prioritize how we feel like it needs to be laid out in order to move you from reactive to proactive. And our very first client, which we're still working with eight months later, um, you know, they they hadn't taken vacation. They were a two year old business, almost two and a half, but they hadn't taken vacation the entire time. And they were basically just adding a crazy number of doors each year just through lead generation sources they had developed. They had done that part right. But what they didn't do right was they had no way of handling all that business.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:22] It was chaos.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:36:23] Yeah, it was total chaos. And so they had no processes in place. And it was firefighting all day long. Right. And everybody's exhausted and worn out. And there's a lot of staff turnover as a result of that.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:34] Yeah. So look, if this is you and you're listening to this and you haven't been able to take a vacation, or your work comes with you on vacation, so it's really not a vacation, or your team is stressed or your team is working weekends. You don't have enough people. There's just too many tasks. That's what that's what Bryan and Didi and the PM business implementers, they solve that, right? So think about eight months later, you're on vacation. Your team is not stressed. You're not going to lose your A-players. Your clients are happier. You're running a proactive business and your churn rate goes down. And now you're growing. And then it just becomes math. So many doors I need to input these people and these people.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:37:15] Yeah and the client that I mentioned earlier, 8-month client, I mean, some of the things we've done for them is we've implemented three major PM lifecycle processes and started the automation on that. We've introduced four new systems into their PM company. We've actually helped them build a website. They didn't even have a website before. They were just bringing in so many doors. But the problem was...

Pete Neubig: [00:37:40] Man, I gotta bring those guys on here, so I can on for growth. Like how the how they, how they doing that.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:37:47] So we've already we've already plugged you in on one remote team member already. So.

Pete Neubig: [00:37:52] Well no, I mean I need to get them on the pod. I need them on the pod, man. If they have, they have operation problems. You know, how many of us have growth problems right now versus OP problems? So. All right Bryan, listen, we're going to cut we're going to hit a commercial break. We're going to hit you back with the lightning round everybody. We'll be right back.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:38:08] All right thanks Pete.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:10] All right Bryan you're going to hit the lightning round. Are you ready?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:38:14] I am ready I think I'm ready.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:15] All right. When you when you had your own business. Um, we know you used AppFolio. So I'm going to go right to the next question. What was your org structure?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:38:24] What was my org structure? Um, so my partner and I were at the top. We had a CFO underneath of us, and then we had branch managers. So we had five, uh, five branches. So five branch managers. And then under each of those branch managers, we had a pod in place.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:43] Pod structure. Got it. Did you use virtual assistants back then?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:38:47] Uh, we did it. Yes. Last, uh, last six years of age, I properties. I used virtual assistants.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:54] What is one piece of advice you'd give someone just starting out in the PM business?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:00] Um. Just starting out, uh, attend NARPM events. You go to a conference, you'll find somebody there that's got 0 to 50 doors. And I applaud them every time because they're they're learning before they get a lot of business and then try to figure it out.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:18] I met somebody at a broker owner conference with zero doors.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:22] I have two.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:23] That's awesome. Um, does pineapple..

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:25] And I still talk to those people.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:25] Yeah. Yeah. I she's at. I think she's in Houston, and I think she's at 200 now, which is good for her. Um, does pineapple belong on pizza?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:34] I believe it does.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:36] Okay. Well, I'll arm wrestle you next time I see you. I'm about that. All right. Um, I know you don't eat fast food, but when you do, what is your go to fast food restaurant?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:45] Yeah, my go to. And it's it's really not necessarily traditionally thought of as fast food, but. Subway.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:50] Subway. Eat fresh.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:52] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:53] What was your first job?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:39:55] Uh, my first job was working in my family. My dad and mom are entrepreneurs, which is where I got it from. But they had automotive parts stores in West Virginia where I grew up. And I worked for my dad and mom.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:08] At what age did they put you to work?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:40:10] Uh, well, around the house. Long before them. In their part. Store at 13.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:15] 13. All right. What is one thing that most people don't know about you?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:40:20] Uh, I used to be a, um, an airborne medic in the Army.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:26] Yeah. I did not know that.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:40:28] Um, and actually, to expand upon that, I'm a two service guy. So I served, uh.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:32] Navy and Army, right? Yep. Yeah. Uh, what book are you currently reading, or what is one that's impacted your business or life?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:40:41] Um, currently I'm reading uh, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Um, I just I like his background. Um, you know, he's.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:49] He's a he's the FBI agent, right?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:40:52] Yeah. The, uh. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:53] Negotiator, FBI negotiator. I actually listened to I actually was, uh, was I actually heard him speak, and he's he's those stories in the book. They're even better when he says it in in person. It's amazing. Um, do you prefer dogs or cats?

Bryan Jenkins: [00:41:07] Dogs. I've got two black labs.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:10] All right. If somebody is interested in reaching out to you guys, uh, for PM business implementers, what's the best way to contact you.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:41:17] Uh, you can always call me. I love talking to people and meeting people.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:21] Spoke like a true salesperson.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:41:24] Yeah. There you go. So my direct number is (205) 728-3929. And you can also email me at Bryan, B-r-y-a-n, bryan@pmimplementers.com.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:39] And if you're listening to this and you're not a part of NARPM, please go to N-A-R-P-M, narpm.org or give those give the folks a call at (800) 782-3452. And if you're looking for remote team, um, give us a shot. It's free for you to use vpmsolutions.com. We have a DIY. We have a white glove service that's free. Or if you just want us to find somebody and and do it for you service. We actually have a new Gold Glove service that we just rolled out. Bryan, thanks so much for being here. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time.

Bryan Jenkins: [00:42:13] Thanks, Pete.