PM PathBuilders: How to Implement Task Management Without Breaking Your Team

Derrik Daun

As you guys can see, Pete Neubig is unable to join us today, so I'll be filling in as host, but you guys came here to see our very special guest. I'm very excited to welcome Candice Vargo from PM Path Builders to join us to talk task management and systems. Before we do get into it, just a couple of housekeeping items I want to go over.

First, the recording will be shared with you. We usually do that within a day, so keep an eye out for that. And then any questions that you do have, please be sure to put them in the Q&A chat.

I will be watching and monitoring that, so any questions you have, put them in there, and then we will ask them for Kandice. So without any further ado, please welcome Kandice Varvil.

Kandise Varvil

I'm so excited to be here, and I love talking task management. Just to give everyone here a little background on who I am and why I am able to talk on task management, I'm the co-founder of PM Path Builders, where we work with property management companies to build systems. We write SOPs, we build them into task management softwares, and so I am incredibly familiar with the back end of task management.

I've worked with a lot of teams on what implementation looks like. I have seen it go really, really good. I have seen it go really, really bad, and I'm just here to kind of walk through, okay, what is this mentality we're taking with task management, and how can we use this system that's supposed to make our lives so much easier without breaking our team?

And so as we go into this conversation, there's a lot of different task management topics that we can discuss here, right? And so I want to let everyone know early, I have no intention on selling task management to anyone. That is not why I'm here, and I don't get paid by them to sell their softwares.

If you want to be sold on that, feel free to schedule a call with many of the wonderful task management vendors that exist in this space. That's not what we are here to do today. Really, my focus of this conversation is how can we actually use this software and implement it in a way that's going to be effective for our team?

So, Derek, anything else I should touch on? Did I miss anything before I just go full send?

Derrik Daun

Go full send. It's all yours.

Kandise Varvil

All right. So when we talk about task management, I first am going to scale back. I'm assuming everyone here knows what task management is, but I'm going to give you guys kind of a quick elevator pitch of what I am referring to when I'm talking about task management.

Task management is the software where you are putting your systems so your team can run them efficiently. So this is going to be a lead simple. This is going to be an aptly.

There is a ton of different softwares that are outside of the PM space. There's Monday. There is a go high level.

And I'm curious, you guys want to throw in the chat, are any of you guys using task management currently? And if so, which one are you guys using? Do we have no task management users?

Derrik Daun

Sure, we do. But we've got. OK, so it looks like the chat has been disabled.

Yes, that makes sense.

Kandise Varvil

OK, but Sean, you're using lead simple. Sean, how long have you been using lead simple? If you don't mind throwing that in the chat.

Or in the in the questions, Q&A. Oh, Matt, you're using Asana. OK, see five years.

OK, lead simple is kind of I built a lot of lead simple processes and it's a really. Oh, Katie, you're using Trello. I'm very familiar with Trello, very familiar with Asana.

Really, the big difference we have with some of these softwares is integration to the PM software, right? So we have lead simple. Actually, these ones will build into your PM software.

You're rent buying your portfolio and then you have ones like Asana. You have ones like Trello that you're using this functionally to help keep your systems in place. You're tracking it, but it's not going to have this integration.

And so it's really cool to see that you guys are using a lot of different things across the board because that's going to change our perspective in this conversation. Right. So whenever we think about task management and why it's on everyone's mind right now, the goal of property management has not changed really since, let's say, its inception.

OK, it's changed a little bit. If we think about like the lord of the land who was, you know, managing all of their tenants across all of their properties in their kingdom, that's a lot different than what we're doing now as property managers. But when you think about really property management for the past 20 years, the goal has not changed.

We are still managing properties. Leases still end. We still need to get those renewals.

Maintenance requests are still coming in. Rent is still due. Owners still need communication.

What has changed and the reason task management is top of mind for so many people is we have this evolution, right? Expectations for communication have significantly evolved. We have people who are now expecting to hear from us a lot more.

We are now having to be higher touch with our owners. Our technology is advancing and so we have to pivot with it. So we have all of these task management softwares and we have all these great opportunities to implement them.

But we have to think, what is the right one for us? So this is really the only point where I'm going to touch on task management and our consideration as we search on shopping for them. And the big thing that I like to bring up here is shiny object syndrome.

Derek, do you suffer from shiny object syndrome?

Derrik Daun

All the time. All the time, yes. What's new is, yes, exactly.

Kandise Varvil

And so a lot of us are hearing these buzzwords, right? We're hearing AI integration, chatbots. We have these new AI powered phone systems that are going to route all of our calls, right?

We have automation. Everything can be automated. There's some of the best people in this industry that can build the most complex automations.

And so we're trying to figure out, how do we integrate that into our software? And so when we think about this task management conversation, we kind of have to put the shiny object syndrome in a box and think, OK, I know I want all of these cool tools. I know I want to implement all of these fantastic things within my company.

But I need to scale back a little bit. And the conversation I need to have is, what makes sense for my team? So why is this actually going to work for us?

And how am I going to make this decision without breaking them, right? And so I'm going to touch on this quickly because I know this is the question a lot of people want answered. So I can get you guys off this call early if you want to jump off.

If this is why you're here, let's knock it out early. And then we're going to get into actual implementation, which is, how do we shop for task management? A lot of you guys are already using them.

So you guys have already done the hard part, which is just making that decision. But what we need to think about is a tool that's going to reduce complexity and not add to it. As I mentioned, there's some PM-specific ones.

We have LeadSimple. We have Aptly. We also have Asana.

We have Trello. We have HubSpot. I could go on and on with the different options we have.

But we have to think, what tools will these replace within our company? How hard is it to build, learn, and maintain? Who in our team is going to own the building of this process?

So I'm curious. I don't know. Is our chat working yet, Derrik?

Do you know?

Derrik Daun

The chat is not. But if you do have any kind of comments or questions, feel free to put them all into the Q&A.

Kandise Varvil

Perfect. I'm curious if anyone wants to throw it as a question. If you guys have someone on your team who is building it, or if you guys contract a third party for people to build these softwares for you, because that's a really big factor on, is this something we're going to be able to actually implement within our company?

We need to determine, will it actually fit within our processes? Is this a to-do list that we're building out? Is this something we are putting our processes into, and now we have to consider implementation that way?

And then, how much visibility is it going to provide? How much manual work is still going to be required? These are all factors that are going to affect that decision.

And the big question is, if it's an all-in-one platform, these are the ones that are going to integrate with your PM software, the lead, simples, and applies, what happens if one part of it breaks? Are we now functionally unable to do our job? Or do we have a backup plan?

How dependent will we become on a single vendor? And even if that's the case, is it worth the cost? Will that still save us enough money and enough time that we can deal with those pain points?

So that's the long of the short, the questions that I would say, consider asking as your shopping task management. But that, again, isn't why I'm here today. I'm not here to tell you which software is to use.

What I am here to talk about is, when are we actually making the decision to do this? We know we need a change. We know something is not working within our company, whether it's not working because it's working so well we know we can make it more efficient, or it's not working because we have owners who are upset and residents who are upset, and they're not hearing from us.

So now, where are we starting? Well, the first things I like to think about is, when are we implementing? How are we implementing?

Where are we implementing? And where is not the software? Where is within our company are we implementing this?

And who should be involved? So if you guys are ready, we are going to jump in to answer those questions. So the number one thing is the one.

And I will tell you, if you are implementing task management, timing is going to be the thing that breaks your team. It is going to break your team before the wrong software. It is going to break your team before a bad process.

If you try to implement a complicated task management during what I lovingly refer to as turn to get in, right, when we have all of our vacancies, that is going to break your team a lot more than any other factor. So our strategy is timing. When are we going to begin this process?

And every great plan will fail if the timing is wrong. So we really need to take the time to look at what is happening within our company, our team, our team members leaving on vacation. Okay, well, we need to then possibly consider delaying this.

We need to consider the seasons within our business. We need to avoid implementing everything at once, which I know is very hard to do when we are buying a software and we are excited and we want to have everything turned on tomorrow. Best way to break it, right?

We are looking at potentially overloading our team and what is the point on having the perfect processes if the team is not buying in. So we need to also think, is it this month? Is it this quarter?

Is it this year? What is a realistic timeline for us to implement these softwares? And we will talk a little bit more about timing in just a bit.

So the next thing for us to consider is where do we start? When we think about our processes, and I am going to get into this on the next slide a bit more, we have to think about where within our business we are experiencing pain, right? So we need to think about what processes are currently working really well and can we systemize and which ones are not working well where we need to fully revamp them.

If you are trying to shove bad processes into task management, you are going to have bad task management, right? So the strategy I like to use when I work with clients and we are implementing task management is I complete what is called a process audit. A process audit is us slowly, painstakingly going through the process and we are saying, okay, we have a new owner.

What is the first thing we are doing? Who is adding them to our PM software? When is that happening?

Is it before the PMA is signed or after? Is the PMA from DocuSign? Is it from Rentvine, right?

So we are going line by line in the process and we are auditing how can we make this more efficient. That has to be done whether it is with a third party or internally. If you want to have a task management that is functional and we are not just throwing in outdated processes that are not going to work for us.

So that is going to be number one. Do our processes make sense and are they prepared to be put into task management? Number two is how are we actually doing this work?

So we have this perfect system of how this process should function but what are we actually doing? And so that is going to be all part of this audit process and then we need a clean system. We need to write it down whether it is using AI.

One of the really cool ways I see people implement AI is they actually record a conversation, put that transcript into AI and say, hey, write me my processes. So that is one way you can do it. You can hire someone who can document it for you but get those processes on paper.

If we automate processes that don't actually exist or are outdated, we are not going to recognize when the automation breaks or we are going to think this is a really badly built process but it is not because it is poorly built. It is because the process is not prepared to be put into that software. So we are going to think about the process.

I am going to overwhelm you guys for a second and I am going to walk you through the high level of the client life cycle that I like to think of and this is really the way that I would structure your process audits. I am not going to go line by line. I would not bore you guys that way but when I think about a process audit and building it within task management, this is the life cycle.

Starting with onboarding, make ready marketing, screening, move in. I switch to day-to-day management. That is going to be delinquency evictions.

I don't have it listed here but lease violations, maintenance. Those are all items that are going to be in that day-to-day management. Renewal, move out, and then offboarding.

So as we think about these processes, they are either tailored to an owner or they are tailored to a resident, right? There is going to be kind of a primary contact there and that is going to help us determine complexity of building task management. So I am going to let everyone take a second and look at this but the way that I would like to break this down is how hard is this process to automate?

If we are building something in task management, which one of these is the place to start? A lot of us are going to say, oh, of course, it is delinquencies and renewals, right? Those are the ones that are happening all the time.

Those are also the ones that are going to be pretty hard. They are going to be really, really cool. I want to be clear.

So cool when they are automated and they are working. Really, really hard to get there because we need to take the time and know how often are we reaching out? Once automation is on, are we comfortable that our three-day notices are being sent automatically?

So we may want to start with some processes that are a little bit easier. Our make, ready, and marketing process. Our owner onboarding process.

There are different levels of complexity and so you guys are welcome to take a screenshot of this and kind of think about this process. But these are also the processes I would recommend having documented. You should have your owner onboarding, your property onboarding.

I have kind of in between these two, resident occupied onboarding. Those should all be individual SOPs you have for your business prior to sending into task management. So I'm going to give you guys a second screenshot of this and then I will jump to the next slide.

Does anyone have any questions from this point? Just high level with all of our lovely processes here. Does anyone have all of these processes documented?

Derrik Daun

I think that's a great question too is how many actually have these already within their framework or within their business? And if not, these are excellent, excellent ideas.

Kandise Varvil

And it's just good to even have it top of mind for you. So if you have a core team member who's out of office, having this marketing process documented is really effective. I'm a big fan of us having templatized, like how we're using AI within our business or even templatized kind of descriptions for marketing.

There's so many pieces of this that we can simplify. Oh, awesome, Sean. So Sean mentioned that they have them set up as lead simple processes.

That is my recommendation. The goal is to get where Sean's at right now, where you have these processes and you put them into your task management and now our team can functionally use them in a way that it's working for us. We're not having to manually do all of these steps all the time.

Derrik Daun

So real quick, Kandice, we had, I believe, Josh had raised his hand. Josh, if you have a question, please put it in the Q&A and then we will answer that.

Kandise Varvil

Perfect. And while we wait for that, I'm going to jump to the next one, which is really another key focus we want to consider when we're thinking about the implementation of task management, which is who. This is where I see most companies end up breaking their processes.

So a lot of the time we have company owners who have built this company either from the ground up, they've inherited this company, but they have put a lot of love and energy and attention into creating these processes. And then they find these key team members who are really good at their job. And now we're saying, OK, it's time.

We have this structure that's working really well. We are ready for task management. Well, what ends up happening is the owner says, I know the process really well.

I am going to take the lead on building this, and then I'm going to hand it to my team member. What happens in this situation is we have team members who are doing something completely different than what the owner had initially done at the beginning of the company, for better or for worse. Sometimes they're operating much more efficiently because the owners had the opportunity to step out of the business.

Sometimes they're operating to the beat of their own drum, and maybe it isn't the ideal process, but it is what they're doing. So when we have these conversations, I really encourage companies to have the people who are doing the work being part of the design of the process. So we need those frontline team members, property managers I really like involved in the conversation, virtual assistants, admins.

I think it's important, especially when they're involved within a role, that they're involved in those conversations, but they're also typically the ones maintaining the process, right? So going in and making edits, and they're going to be kind of our pioneers of the build. So we need to pick out those core team members and know who is going to run this, and who's going to be the expert on this process.

If the processes are created within isolation, they're not going to be adopted, really. It's just we're going to be throwing things at people, they're going to get frustrated, and I can promise you a property manager's job is always going to be more important than learning a software. So the work request is going to come first.

The emergency is going to come first. So we need to encourage them and empower them to be involved in this build as well. We also need really strong accountability.

Oh, the accountability. We need to have people who are here and who are responsible for this implementation. If everyone owns it, no one does.

If no one owns it, it won't get done. So when we think about building task management and having a support team, we should have the process owner. When I say owner, this is not the person who's creating it.

This is the person who, if this falls apart, they are responsible. Oftentimes, this will be the property manager. If it's a delinquency process, it'll be our property accountant.

But this is the person that everything falls back on if things don't get done. The builder is the person that you can either contract out or hire in-house, but this is the person creating the processes for us. A trainer can be interchanged with the builder, but I kind of like the trainer to be hyper independent and someone who's within our team that is becoming the subject matter expert, and that's going to be tied to our champion.

Our champion is the person on the team who's spending the most time with the builder and is like, yeah, we're doing this. This could be the company owner. This could be your operations manager.

But this is the person setting individual metrics on how are we going to make sure implementation is happening, and then end users, who's actually in the process, who are we training to run this day-to-day. So that should be your core team. If it's a small team, you may have just you're hiring a builder, and you as the company owner is also the owner and the trainer and the champion, and you're training your team.

That's okay, but you should still have these hats defined so as the company grows, you can start reassigning people to different positions within your company. So let's think about our implementation, and we're getting to the end of this. So I know I'm throwing so much information at you guys, but we're going to start by, of course, we're determining our team readiness.

We're confirming capacity and timing. We're making sure we're not scheduling the launch of our delinquency process while our accountant is on vacation for three weeks, and they're on a cruise and unreachable, right? We're going to make sure timing makes sense for the team, and we're not going to be in overwhelm when we turn this on because, again, that's a really good way to break adoption.

We're going to focus on the outcome. So we're looking at the end of the line. Our goal with this process is our team has more time to do the work.

We're not missing tasks, and communication is better. That's the outcome. So we are driving every piece of this implementation towards the outcome.

We're going to get comfortable. So if we're learning Trello, maybe we're making a Trello board where we're just tracking our day-to-day tasks, right? If we're using Asana, maybe we're getting comfortable sending some of those emails out in a regular capacity before building out a fully automated software.

LeadSimple and Apli, we're connecting our email accounts early, and we're connecting our calendars, and we're getting used to logging into it every day. But we're going to get comfortable. We do not want to feel scared when we log into our task management software.

And then we're going to build the foundation. We're going to have the SOP built. We're going to have every email templatized that we can templatize so we can put those into the software, and we know what's going to send and when it's going to send.

So this is going to be your kind of beginning, and then we're going to have our rollout toolkit, which is creating that timeline. We're going to have milestones. We're going to say, by this date, we're having this process live, and by this date, we're having this process live, and we're taking it slow.

We're not turning all of our processes on on the 1st of June. Instead, we're going to have a tapered rollout so we can make sure that our team can actually buy into the software. We're going to then determine ongoing training.

Who is going to be accountable for this, and who's going to make adjustments over time? How are we getting feedback from the team if the processes are breaking? So we're thinking about this very high level, and then to round it all out, we're going to think about the when.

We're going to be clear on where in our processes we're starting it. We'll be thoughtful on how we're going to implement it and who on the team is going to be involved. That's it, guys.

It's that easy. Did you guys realize it was that easy to implement task management? Derrik, I feel like you're about to implement like 10 processes this week.

Derrik Daun

I was going to say, you broke it down in great stages and phases that I think is important, because you could try and do all at one time. There's obviously the frustration that can come in, and you definitely do not want that. One question that I did have is you mentioned setting the outcomes and expectations.

Once you flip that switch in the rollout, do you have also a similar kind of process or guidance on those first 30, 60, 90 days to where after the implementation is done, if you're going to have fixes the early round that you can catch it, the better?

Kandise Varvil

Typically, when I think about the implementation, and especially that 90-day stretch, it's going to be, one, we have to think about capabilities. It's going to look a lot different for a Trello versus for an Apley. I really like to have the first 30 days be a lot of manual practice.

We're not sending out a ton of automated emails. We're really doing it kind of slower, which is going to be a little more tedious for the team, but it's going to get them comfortable on, okay, when automation fires, I know what's going to happen, and I'm okay with it. I like to have benchmarks of what is our, we are in it, and we're using it date, and then what is our go live, meaning we're going to be sending things out automatically, and now we're kind of hands off the wheel a bit.

I do think it's really important to have those benchmarks on when are we getting comfortable versus when is it time that we're going full send and getting our team and our clients into that process.

Derrik Daun

Absolutely. All right. We have, I'm going to share my screen.

Are there any other questions that anyone has? All right. Can everyone, can you see my screen?

Kandise Varvil

Sure, yep, I see your HubSpot.

Derrik Daun

It is on, yes, let me bring this over here because I want to talk about, if you have any other questions, please share them in our chat. Okay, Matt has any recommended software platforms and why?

Kandise Varvil

So, there are so, so many good ones, Matt, and I promise you all of those companies will be able to sell themselves way better than I can, but the ones that are going to have integration with PM softwares are going to be really cool because we're going to be able to build out some automations that we can't in other softwares that are meant purely for task management. So, that is one thing that I do think is important to consider as a property manager. Do I want this to see when my leases are expiring so I can automatically have a renewal process start?

Do I want it to see outstanding balances so I can have my delinquency start automatically on the third and remind residents they owe us money? If you want that, you're going to be looking at the LeadSimple or the Aptly. Those are kind of the big names on, we have full integration.

If your focus is just maintaining task lists, Trello is a really cool one. Trello is going to be kind of Kanban style, so you're looking at your processes more visually. Asana is a big player, so I know you're using Asana.

That's a really big player outside of the kind of the PM space, but does a lot of the same things. You're just not going to have that integration. And Connor, yes, I do.

That's actually what I do. So, I work with clients to coach them and help them kind of do the implementation. Not only do I teach companies how to do it, but I can also support them in that implementation and change management.

I'm not the only one in the industry. I would say if you're looking for support in implementing task management, this is the best industry to be in because there's so many incredible consultants who their job is just to help you implement this change management. So, it's myself, there's Process Architect, Black Sheep Global, Kelly Segreto Consulting, Deb Newell.

There's just so many amazing people that their jobs are to help your team run smoother.

Derrik Daun

Absolutely. We have about another minute left, so we'll wrap it up here. This slide, if you would like to register for our next webinar, which is next month, Tuesday, March 17th, Pete will be joined by special guest Sean Johnson to talk about how to turn your company into a wealth machine.

So, that will be a very interesting topic as well. So, you can scan that QR code. But also, for Connor or anyone else, if you would like to book a consultation with Candice, there is a QR code here as well that you can scan.

I'll leave this up for another minute. If you want to also meet with Pete, you can scan the QR code, but Connor, I highly recommend any additional questions or anything you'd like to speak with Candice about or anyone, please scan that QR code and book that consultation. Kandice, any final thoughts you'd like to share?

Kandise Varvil

No, I would just say don't get overwhelmed with it. It is a big process, but it is worth doing. And I'm really excited to hear from everyone, especially people who aren't using it, people who are using it, but are considering a change.

It's just task management really is game changing. It can feel overwhelming. And I'm here to support if anyone has questions.

I've seen it all. I've seen it go really, really poorly. I've seen it go incredibly well and give so much time back to companies.

So, I'm happy to support. And thank you so much, Derrik, for having me.

Derrik Daun

Absolutely. We appreciate your time. Great conversation.

Great topic. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Again, keep a lookout in your emails for the recording and hope everyone has a great day.

Thanks again, Kandice.

Kandise Varvil

See you later. Bye.

Derrik Daun

Bye.