The Hidden Costs of Undertrained Teams

Derrik Daun: As you can see, I am not Pete. Pete is unable to join today

due to a previous, engagement, but my name is Derrik. I am the Marketing

Strategist for VPM Solutions. We are very excited and thrilled to have Jason Wolf from Property Management University to join us today and talk about a subject that we are very passionate about, and big believers in here at VPM Solutions, and that is training. So, without any further ado, I know people are still rolling in, but it is 11.33 Central Standard Time, so we will get things going. I will throw it over to Jason. And Jason, thanks for joining us, and we’re really excited for this.

 

Jason Wolf: Yes, thank you, Derrik. You are not Pete, probably more handsome.

 

Derrik Daun: I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can, yes.

 

Jason Wolf: Hopefully he doesn’t watch this, right? We’ll get the next…

 

Derrik Daun: It’ll be recorded, and I’ll make sure that he watches this.

 

Jason Wolf: Okay, okay, great. Well, hey, thanks for having me, Derrick,

I appreciate it.

Derrik Daun: Absolutely, and if you do have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat. I will monitor the chat while Jason is going through his presentation. So, take it away, Jason. Thank you.

 

Jason Wolf: Alright, I guess I’ll just jump right into it. You know, again, thank you, Derrik, for having me, and you know, Training and education is not typically a very sexy business. It’s not… something that a lot of people get excited to talk about. But, what I hope to do is to go through and spend the next half hour talking to you about what my experience has been as an owner-operator of a property management company. And, what we can be doing, for training of our employees, and the importance of training, and what it’s meant to our company, our management company, our single family. We have a single-family, residential management company here in Utah. And, so my hope is to go through that, go through this slide deck with you. I really encourage anybody to ask any questions. I’m not a sales guy, this is not a pitch.

I’m a broker owner that saw a gap in my own company and, set out about a year ago to solve it. So, I’m excited to talk about this stuff, and again, encourage any, Comments, questions, anything that you guys might have. So, please, jump in. Let’s see here, so I just share this, right?

 

Derrik Daun: Correct, yeah, there should be a share button at the bottom.

 

Jason Wolf: Yep, perfect, let’s see. Let’s see if that comes up.

 

Derrik Daun: Yep, I can see it.

 

Jason Wolf: Alright, you got that? Okay, so again, I kind of already went through this, the hidden costs of undertrained employees, what employees actually want, and how to turn workforce development into a competitive advantage. Again, this comes from a place of being an operator, and then what we’ve learned over the last 12 or 18 months of getting into the education space. If we… Okay. Again, a little bit about who I am. I founded this after seeing a training gap firsthand in my single-family property management company. And so, we set out to build, and I’ll get into this a little bit more, but, to identify really where the gap is in training for our industry, and how we’re, I… I truly believe that this, this, this, this, our industry specifically, the SFR industry and property management, is just underserved, and… and how we try to solve for that. And then I’m going to give you some takeaways, that you can take with you, but… Specifically built for residential PM, not repurposed real estate content. I’ll get into that a little bit.

Couple of numbers for our… for Property Management University. Right now, we have over 4,000. We just crossed 4,000 students this weekend.

That’s a big milestone for us. We had a goal to hit 5,000 students in 2026, and right now, we’re trending to hit about 7,500 students. Our courses are getting fantastic, feedback. We have… we average a 4.9 rating. We have a Net Promoter Score of 87, and we’re bringing on about about 25 new students a day. So there’s really good adoption, and our courses are really good. And I… we don’t have time to get into how we create our courses, but always happy to have that conversation with you if you want to jump on a call. There’s 3 things that I really hope that you can take with. you today, after we have this presentation. Number one is why training is the most undervalued performance lever in single-family residential. Two, how to measure training outcomes practically, and three, how PM University is built to help solve this, okay? Those are the take… the nuggets that I hope. And this is the… this is the one that I think is really, really interesting. If you think about training in… in… in real estate and in property management in general. Multifamily has a lot of support. They’ve been around, you know, 50, 50-plus years. You have the National Apartment Association, you have the NAR, you have these big, strong organizations that provide a lot of, training resources to the multifamily industry. The other pain point that we’re seeing is real estate, and I hear this at our conferences and on our calls all day long, is generally speaking, you have to have… there’s somebody on your team that has a real estate license, which means a real estate, or in some states, a property management license. What that means is that you’re likely required to take continuing education, but the continuing education that’s being offered is all very real estate specific. and nothing that really hones in on property management. I know that in Utah. Property management is list… is mentioned 13 times in the pre-licensing courses, where everybody in property management has to have a real estate license. But property management’s not taught, and I think that that’s really where we see an opportunity to help educate, our industry. NARPA, they’re the gold standard. We are in no way, I want to make this very clear, we are in no way trying to compete Or offer something that NARPM is not. NARPM is still very much… our professional association. It is where you get professional designations. We see ourselves as a path to professional designations through NARPM. And so we work very closely with them. We hope to continue the relationship. But again, NARPM is only able to Educate a certain portion of our industry, okay? I’ve got some data on it, but, and it’s not really worth getting into here, but… that really is where NARPM fits into all of this. So I don’t want anybody to think that this is in any way a competing service to NARPM. But NARPM does a great job. You know, I had a conversation with Anas Arabi a couple of weeks ago, and he… he said something to me that I wanted to quote here.

It’s… he says, the SFR industry lacks the sophisticated training infrastructure the multifamily has had for decades, and that’s true. we just… we just haven’t been… we just haven’t had the resources. And a lot of it, again, being an operator myself. As a broker owner, you have so many balls in the air, you’re juggling so many different things, and… unfortunately, training and education gets kind of put as reactive and not proactive. It’s… it’s… you’re dealing with a maintenance call, or you’re dealing with an employee that might have quit, or you’re dealing with… other fires every day, and so it’s not until you get the HUD complaint or an EPA investigator calls you that you start surfacing training again. And so, Anas has decades of experience in property management, and I just found our conversation really insightful. Let’s see here, where are we? Okay, this is something that I get asked a lot.

When do we see an ROI on training? And it is so incredibly difficult to pinpoint a return on investment. I like to think of it as it’s a lagging indicator. I want to tell you just a quick story. We have some great founding instructors on our platform. Monica Gilroy, for those of you that know… don’t know her, Monica Gilroy has… she’s the, outside counsel for NARPM. And she has been a fair housing litigator for, I think, 32 years, right? She has been in the courtroom litigating fair housing and HUD complaints. So, I’ll tell this story, quickly, if I can. So, we’re doing a master class. We have 100 people in this, in this webinar. Monica’s teaching all about fair housing, and A question comes up about how defensible is this training that she’s offering, and She tells this story that there was an investigation at one point Where a property management company was under investigation, they came in, and they… ask the employees when they received fair housing training. And the employees, this one specific employee, tells them that they attended a webinar for this training. Well, that’s fine, and HUD will accept that.

However, what HUD did is they went back, and they asked when the training was offered, and they went back and did research to see if that webinar was… actually happened, if it actually took place, right? But here’s the real st… here’s the fun part of the story. So we have this webinar, with Monica that’s… and that she’s doing. And as soon as we get off it, I get an email, and it says. Hi, Jason, my name is so-and-so, I’ve been a HUD investigator for 23 years, and I was just in your webinar. Now, you can imagine, as an educator, I panicked. I’m like, great, here we go. Like, they… the Trojan horse, right? They snuck… they snuck right in… they snuck right into our training. So, I immediately text Monica, and I’m like, what do I do? And she says, send them whatever they want. I sent our curriculum to this investigator, and they replied back and said, you are teaching exactly what everybody should be knowing, and you’re doing a great job. So, it was really proof to us that we’re heading in the right direction. So, just kind of a fun… Just kind of a fun little story. But the takeaway here is, if there’s a HUD investigation for a fair housing complaint, the number one thing is you just have to be able to prove that you took training, okay? Now, that’s not going to get you out of hot water. If you broke the law, you broke the law. That’s not… But the penalties are so much lighter if you can show that you have made an effort to train your team, or yourself, in fair housing. And so, going back to continuing education and the requirements of real estate licensing.

That’s great for the broker owner, right? Or that’s great for whoever’s required to have CE. But everybody, I would argue that everybody on your team that interacts with anybody, whether it’s maintenance, leasing, yourselves, BDM, should have some fair housing training. there’s some data over here that I kind of want it took me a long time to figure out To actually realize this, what the cost of an employee that leaves Because, you know, I think… I think we always tend to… jump the gun, or not give people the benefit of the doubt, and just call it a bad hire, and move on. I mean, Derrik, you know this. You know this. I mean, placing the person is only half the battle. It’s what you do after you place them. At VPM Solutions, you do everything you can to place the right qualified candidate, right? But that only gets you so far. You can’t just put them on a shelf and not continue to invest in them. You’ve done all of that work up front.

Invest in them. And so… What we like to look at is. the owner… the owner’s time of having a trained employee, and there’s some statistics here. You know, a typical fair housing settlement, $12,000 to $300,000. I always thought that $300,000 seemed a little high until a couple of months ago, there was actually an SFR company that was just fined $300,000. For a… for a violation? And so, I don’t know, but for my business, that’s catastrophic. I mean, that can sink you, right? I mean, it’s tough to overcome something like that. But I think what we do is we often forget how much… how much time do you spend answering questions?

When an employee comes to you and asks you how to do something, a specific SOP, or how to handle a rental criteria, or… How much time do you spend as leadership answering those questions? And that’s the part of the ROI that’s really lagging, is it’s hard to… it’s hard to track that, and so I think it just gets… It just gets forgotten about, and when you really sit back and think about it… And then the direct cost per employee to hire a replacement, and I’m sure, Derrik, you guys have data on this, but I mean, just the downtime, right, of replacing somebody.

 

Derrik Daun: So… Totally.

 

Jason Wolf: This… this… this stat from LinkedIn Workforce is probably my favorite one. It’s 94% would stay longer when they feel that they’re invested in. I mean, just think about you being an employee, and how it feels when your company invests in your prosperity, right? In your growing, in your advancement. And it just… it… there becomes this buy-in. And that’s… that’s one of my… that’s one of my favorite, you know, 82% retention improves with… with structured onboarding. Again, it’s that first thing. So VPM has helped you hire, but now what’s your onboarding look like? Or do you just, like me, for so many years, I would print something off. now I… then I would go to ChatGPT, I would print off something, because I didn’t have any structured onboarding.

I’d set it on their desk, and I’d say, okay, now let’s talk Friday and go over what you learned, right? That’s not the type of structured onboarding that we’re talking about. We’re talking about actually making an investment, yeah.

 

Derrik Daun: I think that’s a key point. You mentioned the investment, and investment into the new employee is also an investment back from the employee back in the business. It’s a two-way street. And I do like the, the statement there about training isn’t, you know, an HR function, exactly. It’s a… it’s a risk management function. It’s kind of a mindset shift that needs to also take place, yeah.

 

Jason Wolf: Yeah, you know, that’s another one, is somebody said to me the other day. Training feels like it’s something you do to your employees, not for your employees. 

 

Derrik Daun: Yeah, yeah.

 

Jason Wolf: And think about that. Anytime you talk about training or education, or it’s, oh, I gotta… your employee says, oh, I gotta take this training, or I’m being made to take this training, I think you gotta reposition it that, hey, this is gonna help you. This is going to help you be more autonomous, it’s going to help you with your confidence and making decisions on your own, and there’s that empowerment that starts to build there. And that’s the ROI, where people say, what’s my ROI on the training? It’s very, very difficult. Very difficult to put in.

 

Derrik Daun: It is, yeah. Even if you, with a training program, a structured program, if you can just, you know, condense or shrink down that learning curve. Even a little bit, there’s a lot of that ROI back that way, too. Absolutely.

 

Jason Wolf: Just those little hours, an hour here, an hour there, if it frees up your time as an owner to grow the business, and to scale it instead of working in it that everybody talks about, I think.

 

Derrik Daun: Right?

 

Jason Wolf: That’s your hidden ROI. This is just some more statistics, and we believe, what I find really interesting is what I’ve learned Isthat everybody… everybody learns differently, right? And so to create an e-learning, A course, or an on-demand course, or whatever we want to call it. You really want to try to hit all different modalities of how people learn. So, proper instructional design, which is an actual career profession, there’s instructional designers that are out there that help do this when they create a course to try to hit on all of these. There’s visual learners, there’s auditory learners, there’s reading, the people that prefer to read, and then hands-on. And the hands-on is that, kind of that OJT. That’s where they, you know, we do scenarios and drag and drops and engagements and interactions in the courses. But that hands-on is really where they get to practice what they’ve learned on the job.

So, you know, 76% want training, for career growth. You know, Adults, it’s, it’s interesting. Adults, older adults, prefer e-learning training because, one, they know that they usually will do it because it advances their career, they can get a job, they can get… make more money, or they can get a different job. And with everybody’s busy, busy lives, they really gravitate towards that e-learning, where it’s on-demand, where they can do it on the weekends, nights, 24-7. They log in and take it. I struggle personally sometimes with on-demand because of my attention span, so I like one-on-one engagement. But it is nice when you can take it when the time is right, for you. So, everybody’s just a little bit different, so our… your training, what I’m going to talk about is how you can actually start doing some training on your, your, you know, a path to start training your employees. But then again, this, this, this stat, 94% would stay longer at a company that invests in their development, and that was the LinkedIn. workforce, and I find LinkedIn as a pretty credible source for their e-learning and their online education. Let’s see here… So, for those… for those that, Want to really just start focusing on how you can take and do training yourself. First really just identify the gap. What is it? Pick one thing. What is one thing that you want to train your team on, okay? once you’ve identified what that is, then you… you want to go through these four steps. And first, you have to… you have to track it. And yes, there’s LMSs that are out there that are learning management systems that you can… that you can do that are… that, you can subscribe to, but there’s… But just… even just start as simple as a spreadsheet. This is the training, this is my employee roster, this is when they did it, this is when I gave it to them, and just start tracking it. Then what you want to do is you want to start, the time to competency, and how fast do your new hires reach independence? This is hard. But it is a direct reflection if you can take back… so a lot of times we can’t see the forest through the trees, so if you can step back. and actually see if their behavior is changing and the questions that they’re asking, and then check in with them every 30, 60, 90 days. What you’re really wanting to do is to check in, and we survey our students and ask them a pre-course assessment and then a post-course assessment, and we ask them, are you feeling more confident?

Like, do you feel more confident knowing That you had some formal structured training. And so that’s really important… important, excuse me. And then, this is the big… this is what frees up leadership’s time, is the escalation rate. Are employees resolving issues, or still kicking them up? We have a lot of people that hire us to put training programs together for them, and… A good portion of them they say, I’m tired of telling them the same thing over and over. And so then my question is, are you tracking? Are you tracking? It goes back to that first step, are you tracking that you told them that? Because In the event that you ever have to let an employee go, I believe that you should never… it should never be a surprise. There should have always been multiple conversations, there’s multiple coaching sessions, and this gives you an opportunity to do that. And so, we have a lot of people that hire us, to… because they keep telling them, I keep telling them, I keep telling them, I keep telling them, but there’s no tracking, there’s no… there’s no proof that they got that training. And then, does the training predict who stays? And this is the longest… this is the long… this is the long game. If you can… can you track how long is your training keeping people with you longer? And that’s… it’s tough. It’s… it’s… it’s tough to do. We try to… we do third-party surveys, anonymous surveys.

We… we want to know, how they’re feeling when they start, and how theyfeel as the, as the training progresses, okay?

 

Derrik Daun: Jason, real quick, we do have about 5 minutes left, but we do have a question. And again, if anyone else has a question, please feel free to put it in the Q&A. But the question is. How do I choose to invest in training versus investing in acquiring more leads, for example? It’s a tough choice as a small business owner.

 

Jason Wolf: Yes, it is. It is. And I think that in our industry, I think we’re always trying to solve the quick ROI, more leads, fee maximizing.

We’re always looking for that immediate ROI, or that immediate, result,

right? And… I think… It’s a tough one, because I’ve sat on both sides of the fence, and I wouldn’t be where I’m at with my company today if I didn’t, two years ago, step back and switch the investment to training, because it’s… the turnover was a headache, and we were losing a lot of people. And I believe that we had some great people that we lost.

because I didn’t show up and give them what they needed. If I were to go back, I think that a lot of them weren’t just bad hires, it was my investment in them, and I was investing more in the BDM side and the sell side, the more doors. now I would tell you I would invest… I would try to do… I mean, I don’t know what your budget is, but I would try to do a little bit of both. I mean, you gotta get a solid group. Once you get a solid group that can make decisions and they feel confident in what they’re doing, your time will be freed up to go and focus on growing the business and scaling it. That’s not a hard answer, I know.

Derrik. That’s not a hard answer.

Derrik Daun: It’s a good question, and also sometimes, maybe if that role to the person you’re looking to train or invest training into, also has an impact on lead development, business development, you know, the more front-end, like you said. Of training and getting them onboarded.

That’s where some of that may be lagging. ROI comes in, where they’re gonna help you develop more leads and business growth, too.

Jason Wolf: Absolutely. And that’s part of what we’re trying to solve for, is we’re trying to take that training… we want to be your training infrastructure. We want to be seen as an outsourced training department, so… I’ll get into all I actually think. I’ll just kind of quickly go through this. But that’s what we do, is we build a training plan for you, we take your employees, we identify what training they need, and then we have a training success manager that keeps them on track. So almost like an academic advisor when you go to college, we’re there to nudge them so that you don’t have to worry about it. You give us your training plan up front, we help you create it, and then we help that move through So that you don’t… and then you have a dashboard that you can check in on all their training. Real quickly, I know we’re short on time, but we have, basically, we have foundations courses, and those are very entry-level courses. They’re just enough to get your feet wet, right? Just the Property Management 101, Vocabulary 101, Fair Housing 101. They’re your very entry-level courses. Those are all free on our platform. They’re anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. Then we have professional tracks, which are deeper dives. Think of those as thehigher-level courses, and they’re usually multi-courses, so we believe in mastery-based learning, so they build on one another. Like, our fair housing is 8 courses, but it breaks every one of them down. And then our company campuses is when we build out an actual campus for you that’s branded with your logo, your colors. Your employees are in there, they have due dates, they have courses that you want them to take, and then we help them get through that. So, I know that that was really quick,but there’s 3 questions that I’d like you to ask yourself for anybody that’s on this call or listening to the recording, is just ask yourself right now, how are you currently training? Are you focused on training, or are you just focused on doors and fees and revenue? Who owns that training at your company? So, are you doing it, and then who owns it?

Who’s responsible for it? And we have clients that have 2 employees, and we have clients with 40 employees. And so, And everybody’s needs are different, and then if HUD showed up tomorrow, what would you hand them?

Doesn’t have to be from us, but you do get a completion, a certificate of completion that you have. But wherever you get your training, what would you give that investigator? Okay? We have a couple… for those that know Ben Smith, we stole this from him. We took a page out of his playbook. I asked him, because I thought it was such a great idea. But we’ve created this… this… it’s a… it’s a… it’s, let’s see, it’s 10 questions, and it’s get your company GPA. So when you scan this, it will just ask you, a few questions. It’s 10 questions, and then it gives you a GPA of where you stand on your training. And then, of course, there’s a QR code if you guys, you know, want to set up a time and chat with me.

We do have CE that is coming very soon, that we’re going to be offering for those that are real state licensed, and we just, got approved through Enterprise Bank to start accepting credits, for your team’s training. So if you’re… if you’re using Enterprise Bank and Trust, then we can use those credits as well. So… I hit it right on… right on the mark.

Derrik Daun: Perfect timing.

Jason Wolf: It got tough. 

Derrik Daun: Perfect! Perfect time, and we’re happy to stand for a couple more minutes for anyone that is still on. So, if you have a question, again, please feel free to put it in the Q&A or in the chat. 

But Jason, I did actually write down a question from one of your earlier comments. Of, you know, you mentioned being more proactive than reactive. And then you mentioned a little later about a tip, you know, pick one gap or one thing that you could start your better training program for. Are there any other tips or pieces of advice for someone to become more proactive in their training, other than reactive?

Jason Wolf: Well, yeah. Well, compliance, I think, is definitely more proactive, right? So we have EPA, if you manage properties that are pre-1978, that’s being proactive. the fair housing is a proactive approach. But I think it really just… I think it just becomes sitting down and thinking, is onboarding. Does BPM place an employee for you, and what’s next? Is there an onboarding, structured onboarding path? To them, and that’s being proactive. You know, we create company-specific training, so if you have SOPs, employee handbooks, core values, we actually can create training for you that we can put into your company campus. that your people can start taking and get refreshers on, so… I think that that would… I would just… I would just start by identifying where your… where your… where your weak spots are, what you’re struggling with the most.

 

Derrik Daun: Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense.

Jason Wolf: You know.

Derrik Daun: So we are a couple minutes over, but thanks everyone for staying on, and it looks like a majority of people did stay on. I do want to thank Jason for your time and some great information, great insights, a lot of good stats, and I definitely agree about LinkedIn.

They do provide some really good, you know, company stats and things to keep an eye on, and how do you, you know, compare and everything of that. Highly recommend to, the recording will be sent out to everyone, to scan that QR code that Jason provided. Check out what your company GPA is. I like that idea. That’s fun. Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Wolf: And you can find us at pmuniversity.com. You can email me at jason at pmuniversity.com. I’m happy to have a conversation and show anybody around.

 

Derrik Daun: Perfect. Well, thanks again, everyone, for joining. Keep a lookout for next month’s VPM webinar, another great topic. But until then, I will see you, and Jason, thanks again for your time.

Jason Wolf: Thanks for having me, Derrik. Take care.

Derrik Daun: Thank you.