The $10, $100, $1,000 Rule: How Tony Cline Helps Property Management Owners Reclaim Their Time | Tony Cline

A Podcast | Tony Cline

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to the NARPM Radio podcast. I'm your host Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. And today I have a very special guest, Tony Cline. Tony and I go way back. We're not just associates, but friends. I consider Tony a friend of mine. Tony has a really interesting path, very similar to mine, but he's actually gone even a little bit deeper. Tony created Cliffdwellers out in Denver, Colorado, built that up. He then merged with, I think, four or five other companies. Tony, remind me. Is it five, five other companies?

Tony Cline: There were three companies.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Three companies claim HomeVault and HomeVault was in how many?

Tony Cline: We wound up operating in six different states, seven different markets.

Pete Neubig: Six different states, seven different markets. And then we're not going to talk about it on this podcast. Tony, we'll have you come back about how that actually worked out with HomeVault and the challenges that you saw with a merger. And that was one of the reasons why HomeVault decided to exit to Pure. Tony took a job with Pure for a little while. Then he really created a package because of all of his knowledge, everything he's done, and he created the Onyx Property Management Coaching. And he actually does events and this retreat that he does in Colorado. Tony, thanks so much for being here, buddy. Hey, thanks, Pete.

Tony Cline: It's great to see you again so soon.

Pete Neubig: So, for those of you who do not know Tony, he's a little bit nuts that he runs these 100 and 200- and 300-mile running races all in like one weekend. So he sleeps standing up and just stuff that I like. If you know me, I was an Ironman triathlete and I think he's nuts. So he literally went above and beyond craziness. And so Tony, I want to talk a little bit about what you and I, lessons learned from training and how it correlates to business. But before that, I want to talk a little bit about your retreat because we're kind of fresh off it. We've been probably about a month since I've been on a retreat. And I got to tell you, some of the exercises that you put us through, it really was thought provoking. I've thought I've seen it all, read all the books, done all the things, had all the business coaching, and you really opened my eyes to a couple of things. And one in particular was the $1, $2 and $3 exercise. Can you just talk a little quickly about that?

Tony Cline: Yeah, I think as entrepreneurs, when we first start our business, we wind up doing everything. And as we grow, we bring in other people to help us, but we still feel like we are the hub of the chief firefighter. We're the one that can do anything better than anybody else. And so we wind up holding on to what I call the $10 an hour activity. So in business, as an entrepreneur, you have $10 an hour activity, $100 an hour activity, and $1,000 an hour activity. And until you really analyze what you're doing throughout the day, you don't realize how much of the activity you do that's that $10 an hour activity. And if you think about this, if you came to work and you spent eight hours doing $10 an hour activity, you've provided $80 worth of value to your company. And if you could just elevate yourself out of that $10 an hour activity and get into something more like business development or client relations, now you're doing $100 an hour activity. And if you're doing $100 an hour activity and you came to work, you could do $800 worth of value for your company. But really where we try to get the entrepreneur is we try to get them to focus on that $1,000 an hour activity, which means if you came to work and worked, even if you only worked two or three hours intentionally on that $1,000 an hour activity, that vision setting, looking at new tools that are coming out, the AI stuff that's hitting the market. If you spent two or three hours just doing that, you've provided $2,000 to $3,000 worth of value for your company. And that just compounds exponentially as you work in your business. And so our job is to try to extract that entrepreneur out of the day-to-day $10, $100 an hour activities to really have a deep impact on the organization.

Pete Neubig: What would you say is probably the number one $10 activity that you still see most business owners doing?

Tony Cline: Firefighting. Dealing with a resident that's upset, that's calling about a late payment and they want to explain why it's late and your team can't handle it. So it gets escalated to you or an owner that's complaining about an $80 invoice that they think should have been $60. You should be able to educate your team, provide them with our policies, provide them with training on how to handle those situations. It's not that those aren't important things. They need to be done in the company. They just don't need to be done by you.

Pete Neubig: So take us through, I'm giving your secret sauce out for free here and I get that, but take the audience through like how they should go about finding if they're actually doing a one or two, a $10, a $100, or a $1,000 an hour job.

Tony Cline: Yeah. So first of all, Pete, all the secret sauce I have, I give away for free because it really comes down to there's information and then there's implementation. And if somebody can take the information that we provide and do it themselves, then that's great. But if they see that they can be more successful quicker by surrounding themselves with the people like the people that were at the retreat and getting help with the implementation, then that's where we step in. So, what we do is we have people go through and make a list of everything they do on a daily basis. And then in the column next to it, they either do a $1 symbol or a $2 sign symbols or $3 sign symbols. And that kind of shows you as this $10, $100, or $1,000 an hour activity. And so, you list all the things you do on a daily basis, then weekly basis, then monthly basis. And then what we did was we combined that with a second part of the exercise, which just for sake of time, we probably won't go too deep into. But we talked about assigning these genius zones. So, is this something you're incompetent at, competent at, an expert at, or a genius? And really, we should at the end of the day, as entrepreneurs be focusing our time on the $1,000 an hour activity that's in our genius zone. And that's where we have the biggest impact on our company. And we should create the means to be able to hire out or delegate everything else.

Pete Neubig: I know when I did it, my $1 an hour thing was email.

Tony Cline: I knew you were going to say that. That was a big one for a lot of people there.

Pete Neubig: Big one for a lot of people. And I think when you're doing it, you are not Tony, but you as you're writing this list, you decide if it's a $1, $2, or $3 an hour job. There's nobody else. It's your thing. And I know in property management, when I owned my PM firm, everything was in email. Now there's more tools for us that hopefully you guys aren't running your whole business through email. But even at VPM, I said, Tony, I spent a lot of my time on email. Do you remember what you said to me?

Tony Cline: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Why? Who's emailing you? You said, who is emailing you? And then I had to think and I'm like, well, I get a lot of system alerts that I don't really need to even like, I just need a couple of system alerts. And so I just built a bunch of filters, one into a bunch of folders. And I got to promise you, man, since I've done that in the last few weeks, my stress level has gone down because if I see my email piling up, even if it's just a bunch of junk, I get stressed for whatever reason. That's a me thing. But now, honestly, Tony, I need more friends because nobody emails me anymore. So that one thing alone has probably shaved off, let's call it 20 minutes a day, maybe 30 minutes a day of my time. But that compounds over time.

Tony Cline: Not to go too deep into this one topic, because we spent four days together. It was fabulous. But some of the other people that said email, they said, well, because I don't have some of this other infrastructure in place, I have asked to be copied on all the emails that are going in and out to our team.

Pete Neubig: I couldn't believe how many people were in that retreat were still being copied on everything.

Tony Cline: Yeah. And so sometimes they would reply, which means now they're stepping into the middle of a process, screwing things up because they may have provided the answer to something, but they didn't work the workflow all the way through to completion. So now they're messing up the system. And as an entrepreneur, you don't need to be, as the leader of your company, you do not need to be involved in every conversation. If you are, then everybody else is irrelevant. Because why do you have them if you're still involved with everything that's going on in the business?

Pete Neubig: Yeah, we can go down a big rabbit hole about superhero-itis and cutting your team out. I got to tell a quick story. So, when I was working for Mind, I was the Eastern region vice president, Tony. All that really meant Mind, because the Eastern region, by the way, starts in Colorado, if you didn't know that, from Mind back then in 2019. So I was the Eastern region vice president. So, I had properties from Colorado all the way to the East coast. And I had, I don't know, six or eight property managers under me. All that really meant was I was the senior property manager. And so, I get a call one day to like, hey, I have this escalation. They want to talk to you. And it was from like the call center. And I'm like, no, I won't talk to this owner. It's like, why won't you talk to the owner? I'm like, the owner has to talk to the property manager. And then the property manager has to escalate to me. I'm like, if that owner comes directly to me and I solve their problem, guess what I'm doing? I'm managing that property. We can't do that. That was the straw that broke the camel's back and we parted ways shortly after. So just a fun story. All right. So I want to switch gears a little bit because some of the stuff we just talked about kind of relates into training and how it relates to business. So mostly, you know, having a coach, accountability. So talk to me about your, you know, kind of the beginnings of your training, what you learned and then how it actually, how you saw that where it's relatable to business. And then you built a whole coaching program literally around this. You know, there's a lot of things that you built in your coach program from your journey.

Tony Cline: Yeah. Well, I'll give just a very quick background. A lot of people already know my background that I bought a property.

Pete Neubig: We get tons of downloads, man. I'm sure there's a few people that haven't heard your background.

Tony Cline: All right. Did you say tens of downloads or?

Pete Neubig: Tens of downloads.

Tony Cline: So in 2000, I had exited another business and was looking for something else to do. I bought a property management business. I really bought a brokerage and they were, I found out during the due diligence that they were doing property management on the side. And so I came into the industry fresh with my technology background. And then I worked really hard to grow that business, did really well. And then in 2006, because I was controlling everything, everything went through me. I would even get up and walk around other people's desk after they'd hang up the phone and I'd say, well, who were you talking to? And what did you say that for? And what did they say? And, you know, I would kind of fly by and, and kind of peck on them and tell them what they should have said. I didn't give any training. It was more just berating them of-

Pete Neubig: You were not finding the fault not the good. It was a standard management practice.

Tony Cline: Yeah. And, and so, so I was really stressed out being the center of everything. And then I wound up getting sick in 2006 to the point where I was out of the office more than I was in for about six to eight months. And my business started to collapse. Like I, I had to really figure out how am I going to run this business without me being able to be in the office every day. And that's when I started to delegate. And it took about two years, but my body started healing. And, and at that point, I said, I don't want to be known as the sick guy anymore. I want to be known as the guy that could run a marathon. And you and I didn't know each other yet. And so I didn't know anybody that had ever run a marathon. And I thought I will go out and do this. And so just through brute force and really ignorance, I, I completed my first marathon. And, and it wasn't for lack of effort, but it was just from not really knowing the right way to go about doing it. So I crossed the finish line. My legs were on fire. I collapsed into the grass and I thought I did it, you know, I finished. But what I since learned after the fact, after I started getting into these longer distances is there are people that can help you not take shortcuts in a negative sense, but shortcut the amount of time it takes you to learn the right way to do things. And so in, in 2021, I finished the Moab 240 in out of a hundred or 250 starters, 168 finishers. I finished in 92nd place. I hired the guy -

Pete Neubig: I can't believe there's that many people that are that crazy to do it.

Tony Cline: Yeah. Yeah. Well, now there's a waiting list. Now it's a lottery, but that's crazy. The next year I, I hired the guy that finished in first place. I said, I need to know what that guy knows. I need to be around somebody that's performing at that high of a level. He, he literally finished almost two full days and nights ahead of me. Um, and, uh, and so I hired him the next year I finished, I went back and I finished in the top 10 finished in ninth place. And what I learned about that is there are people that are performing at the level you want to perform at in just about every aspect of your life in business and health and every, every aspect of it. And so what I did was I took my experience in business and my experience in being an ultra marathon. And we created what we called the championship formula. And there are seven core components and we work through that, but that's, uh, that's the core of our coaching program, helping people go from where they are to achieving really, really big results, um, with the help of our coaching program and the other people in our community.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So let's break that down a little bit. Um, when you're like you have this vision of finishing a marathon or doing Moab 240, is that right?

Tony Cline: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Moab 240, right? So again, like our business, we have this vision. What is, what does the business look like when, when it's complete or where do you want to go? Do you want to be in one market? You want to be multi-markets, right? What, what did you want to do? SFH, SFR, do you want to do multifamily? Whatever it is. So, uh, so you had this vision. So let's talk about the vision of Moab when you came in ninth place versus like that, uh, that let's break that down. Moab versus your first marathon. Okay. So you had a vision, the vision was marathon division was Moab 240, right? Much bigger vision. So my first question is when you did that first marathon, did you even consider like, Oh yeah, I, I, this is small. I want to go big 240 miles.

Tony Cline: No, I was actually, when I finished my first marathon, it was one and done. I was just going to be, that's it, check it off the list. I'm done. But I realized, yeah, I got the t-shirt, got the metal, ate the banana, you know? Uh, but, uh, what I realized is the, the more you chase your, your dreams and your desires and your goals, you, you, you search for your limits in those. And the more you search for your limits, the harder they are to find. It's kind of like driving in a car. You know, if you're going at night, you got the headlamps on, you're driving five miles an hour. You can see a little bit out in front of you. You start driving 50 miles an hour. You can still see out in front of you. And so the faster you go, the farther you go, you still can see a little bit more. You got a little bit more potential. You see a little bit more of the path down the road. And so I just started applying those principles of if I can do this, what else can I do? And what other parts of my life can I apply it to? And that's what we take people through in our coaching program. It's really the transformation of a business really starts with the transformation of the leadership because you will never accomplish something that you don't believe you can accomplish.

Pete Neubig: I also think taking your 50 mile an hour deal, if you don't have a vision and you're driving 50 miles an hour and you're going the wrong way from what you really think, you're just getting further away from your goal or your vision, right?

Tony Cline: Yeah. I don't know where we're going, but we're making really good time.

Pete Neubig: All right. So now let's talk about your marathon. The first thing that I'm kind of going through this in my mind, you kind of brute forced it, right? So the first thing that I noticed is you weren't plugged into a community. Like were you plugged into a running community when you were doing the first marathon versus-

Tony Cline: I didn't know anybody. I showed up. I actually wrote a letter. I don't know if I've told anybody this before, but I wrote a letter to my wife. I told her don't open it until I leave the starting line because I didn't know if I was going to finish. And because I had been so sick, I didn't know if I was going to cross the finish line, like the ultimate finish line. It was just one of these things. It's like, hey, thanks for standing by me. But it was just the two of us. I didn't know anybody else. I didn't know anybody at the finish line. It was just me and my wife as support. And yeah, there was no community for me at that point. And it was very lonely and very-

Pete Neubig: Well, let's talk a little bit about the power of community because we are, I mean, it's a NARPM podcast. We obviously believe in the NARPM community. And then you actually even have another community with Onyx. So let's talk about the community that you built to get to the 240-mile finish line, multiple times, by the way. Let's talk about that and the big difference in your journey to solve that or to get to that vision, to accomplish that vision.

Tony Cline: I love this topic because whether it's running or business, number one, you have to have a vision. Number two, you have to share that vision with people that can make a difference. You have to be really careful with who you share your goals with because if you share your goals with somebody that is not going to support it, they can crush your dreams when they're fragile. So you have to be very selective of who you're sharing that with. But if you share it with people that support it, they will help you get to the finish line. And so when we run a race, like in just a month or so, I'm going to go and run the Bigfoot 200. I know where the start line is. I know where the finish line is. There are checkpoints. They're called aid stations throughout the race. And I kind of know where those are. So I have milestones along the way to help us know, are we on track to to achieving our final destination or the end goal of our vision? But we don't know every step of the way. We don't know every step we're going to take. But you can get a team that will buy in, a community, a crew that buys in to helping you achieve what you want to achieve along the way. And it's so much more fun and more powerful and more rewarding when you're doing it with a team versus when you're doing it by yourself.

Pete Neubig: You know, when I when I decided to do my first Ironman, I had done, I think, some sprints, right? So and I decided and I and I sign up and my mindset was, I don't know if I can finish this. And the first one of the first things I did, Tony, was I found a community before I found a coach before anything else. I had I had the goal, I had the vision. I had about a year to get there. And the first thing I did is I found a community. And here's the interesting thing. I ended up hanging out with guys that had done 10, 15, 20 Ironmans. And they changed my mindset as I was training with them. And as I was learning from them, my mindset got changed to not can I finish, but how fast can I finish this Ironman in? And I think it's very similar in business. If I'm talking to somebody at NARPM, and I'm trying to get to 1000 units, and they're already over 1000 units, like they have that blueprint, I can, they can kind of guide me just through their stories and their knowledge. And I can skip a lot of steps. Do you find that did you do you did you find that? Does Onyx provide that? And did you find that with your running?

Tony Cline: Absolutely, not just with running, which absolutely was a big thing. I I accidentally fell into the ultra running world. I went to this, they were showing off some shoes at this local event. And I wanted to go check out these shoes. I bumped into this guy named Miguel. And through conversations, I found out that people ran 100 mile races, I didn't even know that those things existed. But it it showed me was possible. And I met somebody that was currently doing it. Same thing with NARPM. I ran my my property management company from 2000 until 2011. I didn't even know that NARPM existed. I didn't know that there were other property managers that you could collaborate with. And so I was operating this company on an island. Once I got involved with NARPM, I immediately my second local meeting, I was volunteered to be a membership chair. And, and from there, I got to know everybody. And then I wound up becoming the the chapter president and in 2014, again in 2019. And what I've learned about being in a part of a community is if you really go in to serve, you can't out give no matter how much you give you, you just get more back. It's, it's impossible to give more than then you get back. And the more you give, it just keeps coming back the relationships you create, the connections you have, when you're having a bad day as entrepreneurs, I know we all want to quit some days. And, and you don't have anybody to quit to you don't have anybody to to share your, your pain with. But when you're in a community, whether it's NARPM or Onyx community, or my running community, you have somebody that's been through what you're going through, and can help you see a way out and help you get your chin back up and carry on.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I think being an entrepreneur can be you can be a very lonely position, especially if all of your friends went the went the standard route where they went to one got a good school got a good job, and like you're having these challenges and they cannot relate to them. Having that community. It's like, now do I relate to that, but I ran into that and let me show you how I solve that. Right? It could be it could be in running or like I have a GI problem. And then got you know, one of my buddies would be like, well, yeah, you're eating that chocolate goo that that's known to like, like eat the plain goo or the vanilla goo like just little things make a huge impact on your on your training because to stay you know, to stay on on target or on your business. And you're right, sometimes man, misery loves company. And we need to just have somebody to call and just say, man, I'm just having a bad day. And that person been there done that and it feels that feels good.

Tony Cline: Yeah, I think there's two parts of that. Number one is somebody that will listen to you. But then somebody that will kind of smack you around a little bit and say, All right, you you know, you had your you had your one day now, pick yourself back up and let's get back after it. And here's a path forward. Here's what you can do to, to solve that. And, and like I said earlier, I truly think that before you can transform a business to be better than what it is to achieve the goals you want to achieve, you have to become the kind of person that can run that type of organization. And that's where being a part of a group facility facilitates that it gives you the people to be around that can help expand what you believe is possible. And then once you believe it, then they can help you figure out how to achieve it.

Pete Neubig: Now, one of the things that you mentioned was some milestones. But let's go back, back one more step. When you did your first marathon, did you have a plan? Did you just, well, you just got you said brute force. So I'm guessing no plan, you just ran every day, just kind of found what you thought was right, versus now you have a coach who creates a plan and that plan is built to, to get to that, that you know, that ultimate goal.

Tony Cline: Yeah, absolutely. When I first did my first marathon, I didn't know how to train. Nobody told me how to train. Nobody told me what to do on a day-to-day basis. So I was basically reacting, firefighting. One of the things that I was doing was, I thought the faster I run, the better I'll perform in the marathon. And so I was red, redlining my, my heart rate. I was always, if you're not a runner, you know, there's zone one through zone five. And is when you're training, you're supposed to stay in zone two. I was consistently training in zone four or five. So I was going out way too hard, way too fast. And, and so my training really wasn't allowing my body to recover in between. And so when you're training, the benefit comes from the rest days in between. You go out, you run hard, you break your body down, then you allow your body to rest. Not unlike business. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our benefits come from what we, we, I used to call them rest days. My coach now intentionally calls them active recovery days. We're doing specific things where we're, where we're disconnecting from the sport. Same thing in business, disconnecting from the business. I feel bad for the people that sleep with their cell phone next to their bed in case an emergency call comes in, you know, but you have to disconnect to allow yourself to be able to fully recover. But yeah, I didn't have a plan. I just went out hard and fast and, and I was just doing everything wrong. Like I said, brute force was what got me through.

Pete Neubig: So I'm a, I'm a big believer in, you know, in having that community, but the community only gets you so far. Having a coach to me, so I've had a coach for a triathlon, for, for running, for weight loss, for lifting. I've had a personality coach. I've had a business coach. I'm sure I'm missing a couple in there. I've had, so I'm a, I'm a big believer in this, but the coach helps you formulate the plan and hold you accountable. Do you see the same thing happening? I'm guessing Onyx is doing a little bit of that. And you are along with your coach for your, your running. Is that, you're seeing the same kind of similarities there?

Tony Cline: Yeah, absolutely. You set the game plan. You look at where, where are we now? Where do we want to go? What do we need to do to get from, from here to there? And, and then we lay out a plan. You know, it's, we talked about this a little bit at the retreat, but people get excited when they set a goal, they get that dopamine hit. I'm going to lose 10 pounds. I'm going to read a book. I'm going to write a book. I'm going to do whatever. And they get that dopamine hit. And there's a difference between setting a goal and making a commitment and having a coach helps you with the commitment that what are the daily activities that I need to do or weekly activities in order to achieve the goal. And a lot of times, if we're not working with a coach, like my coach, my running coach will reset my plan every two weeks. He'll look at, what did I do? How did I perform? How did my body react? Cause he's got access to some stats and some apps that, that we use.

Pete Neubig: Some metrics. Metrics. Yep. Some metrics. We're going to talk about that in a second, but go ahead. So he looks at every two weeks.

Tony Cline: Yeah. And then we readjust based on where we are. We're not changing where we want to go. Like I can't change the finish line of where the big foot 200.

Pete Neubig: I only want to do a 170.

Tony Cline: Yeah. I feel good. 170. That'd be good. That's good enough. No, it's we're, we're going to still get to the 200. What do we need to do to adjust to make sure we stay on track? And so we, we analyze those metrics as we go. But one of the things that I'm really a big believer in is you set the goal once and then you figure out what your, what your commitments are. And if you're doing your daily commitments, if you're doing the things that you committed to, so whether it's running or business, if I want to grow by 10 doors a month, that's great. That's a goal. What are you doing on a daily basis to actually pull that off?

Pete Neubig: And how are you tracking it and how are you tracking it?

Tony Cline: Yep. Some companies will, will say, okay, I want to grow 10 doors a month. They set that goal in January. And then in August, they look and go, Oh, geez, we haven't been doing that. Well, what are we going to do to catch up? And then they say, well, now we need to grow 20 doors a month or whatever. And they didn't have a plan for 10 doors a month. They still don't have a plan for 20 doors a month. They have a goal or a wish, a wish, but they don't put in the daily commitments. They don't break it down and say. And so now I don't I don't worry. Am I going to cross the finish line at the Bigfoot 200? Now something can always happen. It's a long way. You're going to have health issues. I could roll an ankle at mile seven, you know, all of these different things. But as long as I'm doing my daily commitment, that is a part of my plan, then I'm taking care of the commitments. The goal will automatically happen.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, man. One of my biggest pet peeves is when we have our quarterly or yearly offsite. And my my business partner would go. Yeah, we want to get to, you know, 500 doors, you know, this next year. I'm like, OK, we're at 200. So you want us like over more than double to 500. And then it's like, great. OK, all right. So what are we doing to get there? And he's like, well, I don't know. I just want to get there. I'm like, yeah, that's a wish. That's not -

Tony Cline: The worst thing to stack on top of that is, well, I don't know. We'll hire somebody. We'll hire a business development person and they'll get us there. Well, if you can't figure out how to get your own company to where you want to go, they're not going to step in and figure out how to get them. You know, they may bring their skill set and their background and their expertise, but you still have to have a plan and a formula of what you're going to provide. I talk about when we send people into battle, we need to give them the proper equipment to be successful. And whether it's in sales or operations, we need to give people the right the right equipment to go in and succeed. And if we're not doing that, we certainly can't expect them to hit the goals that the wishes that we have in our heads.

Pete Neubig: And so your coach is looking at your metrics, just like as a business, we should be looking at our metrics and then you course correct, right? If you're not hitting a specific metric in your business, i.e. we're not getting to those 10 doors, then what are we doing? What's working? Okay. This marketing piece is getting us this many leads, but it's only adding this many doors. Do we have a sales problem? Do we, can we create another marketing strategy? Like, and so you have to break this down. Um, your coach is looking at your metrics every two weeks and running. How often should we be looking at metrics as a business, Tony?

Tony Cline: The way, the way we coach, we coach on an EOS-ish type of platform. I think for small businesses, most property management companies are, are too small to be EOS purists, but we do use some of their basic meeting fundamentals. So we'll do a daily huddle once a day for training somebody. Then we do a 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night for the first seven to 10 days. But outside of that, it's a daily huddle for 15, 20 minutes every day, get the team together, discuss the urgent things that can't, uh, wait until our weekly meeting. And then we'll track our metrics on a weekly basis. And I've seen companies try to get super, you know, with AI right now, everybody's trying to automate everything. What I see is when you track metrics and you automate the collection of that data and the reporting of that data, your results actually go down because the people responsible for those metrics are disassociated from the pain of reporting that they didn't hit their number and having to then report it in the meeting live. And so we, we're going to track our numbers once a week, but we're also going to require the people who are responsible for each one of those metrics to go in and report it. The day before we have our meeting where we report, and then they have to report live when they don't hit their, their metric.

Pete Neubig: So, I learned that from the retreat and I think you'll be proud of me. We just created some metrics for our new sales; sales team that we put out there. And, uh, my business partner's like, Oh, we can, um, you know, we can have this report and it can put right into the spreadsheet. I'm like, nope. I'm like, I want the report to be easily accessible so they can see the information and obtain the information quickly. But I want them to manually put the number in there because let's say they had to do five social posts and they put zero in there. That's, that's really hard to put in there.

Tony Cline: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: You know, you get to feel that. All right. We're up against it, Tony, but I want to actually ask you, cause you mentioned one other thing here about you have, when you do this, uh, this 200-mile races, you actually have a support group. I kind of equate that as like your team in business. Like, so talk a little bit about the correlation there. Like how important is that? Is that support group? How important is the team?

Tony Cline: Well, I think, I think it's everything. I think as the business owner, you were responsible for setting the vision, the direction, as you mentioned earlier, you know, if you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up anywhere. And so as the owner of the company, it's up to you to not only create the vision in your head, but over communicate it. You cannot communicate your vision enough times to your team where they get sick of hearing it. People long to be a part of something great. And they want to support you in the efforts of growing the business and in creating new opportunities for them as well. And so we need to share our vision. And then, you know, there, there are two ways to run a business. One is you're the genius with a bunch of assistants. And the other way is you're a conductor of the orchestra with an expert sitting in each chair, playing the instrument much better than you could. And if you set your vision out there and say, this is where we're going now, help us figure out how we're going to get there. And you rely on those experts that you've hired, that sometimes might even be scary that if they found out that you don't know as much as they know about a specific topic, those are the kind of people you need to bring into your company and then get out of their way and let them, these are, these are our, our, our vision. And these, this is our target client that we're working for. And these are our policies that we have in place. So what we do and, and why we do it, then the process of how we do it, you give that to them and say, okay, help us create the path forward. They're going to step in and, and figure out ways to do things that you couldn't, because if you're as smart or smarter than them in every position, then, like I said before, they're redundant. You either have the wrong person in that seat, or you're the wrong person in your seat. And we need to work on helping you become the kind of person that can be the conductor of the orchestra versus the chief firefighter.

Pete Neubig: Well said. Tony, we've talked on so many topics that at the retreat, we went deep, deep dive into. And so, if somebody's interested to learn more about Onyx or learn more about the retreat, or do the Rim-to-Rim next year, I don't know if you're promoting that yet, but how do they get in touch with you? How do they learn more about Onyx and the great things you're doing over there?

Tony Cline: Yeah, for sure. So, on all the socials and our website, it's just onyxformula.com. So that's the website. If you want to reach me, just tony@onyxformula.com. If you are interested, we've released the, the wait list for the Rim to Rim. You went with us last year. It was a great time. We've done it a few times now, a small group of property management entrepreneurs. We will go Rim to Rim in the Grand Canyon. It's a life-changing experience. You don't have to be an ultra-runner. You just have to be committed to showing up, having done some of the training that we'll, we'll walk you through. And the training is essentially just walking around your neighborhood, you know, getting on the stair stepper every once in a while, or something like that. But if you're interested in that, there is a wait list you can sign up for. It's not a commitment. It's just, hey, when you release the details and the date, I want to be interested in knowing that so that I can decide if I want to sign up.

Pete Neubig: And is there a site for that yet or do they?

Tony Cline: That's just go to onyxformula.com/waitlist.

Pete Neubig: Awesome. And if you're listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, you can go to narpm.org or give them a call at 800-782-3452. And if you are, if you do need some team and you don't have the time to, to hire, or you're a little scared to hire, give us a call or, or go to our, go to our website, vpmsolutions.com or email me pete at vpmsolutions.com. And we'll be more than happy to help you with finding a remote team member that fits in with your organization and fits in with that job role. Tony, thanks so much for being here, buddy.

Tony Cline: Hey Pete, before we fly, I'm going to give you one, one real quick plug. You at the, at the retreat gave two really great presentations on hiring and selecting. And then now that I've hired, now what, how do we onboard people? And, and I know you have a lot of those resources on your website. So if, if somebody is interested in something like that, I mean, I can't, I can't plug you enough on the resources that you have, both on how to hire themselves, but also like, why would you do it yourself? You guys have your white glove, gold glove program. So not to turn it into a commercial, but you provided a ton of value at the retreat. Really appreciate you being there and want to make sure that I shared that with the world.

Pete Neubig: I appreciate you. Thanks, Tony. See everybody.