Peter Lohmann's Newsletter - Issue #98

How To Work On Your Business, Part 2

Looking for Part 1? It’s in issue #94, which you can find online right here.

Shed the Puritan Work Ethic

I had puritanical ideas about hard work and laziness drilled into me from a very young age. And those lessons may have even been appropriate given my natural inclinations, especially as a teenager and young man. But they no longer serve any useful function. Working is a functional activity. It has no moral value. This mindset shift is a journey that I am still on.

You do not need to be working every moment that you are at work. In fact some of your most transformation and important “work” will be done while you are explicitly not working.

It can be difficult to feel OK with leaving the office to go on a long walk at 10am on a Tuesday, especially as you head out the door on a warm spring day past your hard-working employees. But this is the way.

Get Comfortable with 85%

As you start to gain leverage by hiring people, you will notice mistakes. You may start to doubt yourself — maybe hiring someone to do this was the wrong move after all? And it can be very frustrating when you see a job done incorrectly or an error on a document that was sent to a customer.

Or maybe you feel like your employees are slacking — they’re simply not working as hard or as fast as you did, back when you did that job.

I’m here to tell you to get comfortable with this. It’s not going away. Nobody is going to give as much attention or speed to tasks as an owner. But if you want to grow and scale, you’ve got to get over this. As long as you have some systems in place to address problems as they come up, it’s truly OK if things go wrong once in a while. People are understanding; if anything it can be an opportunity to show customers how you conduct yourself professionally and make things right. This can actually strengthen your relationship with the customer.

And when you find the right person for the job, don’t be surprised when they end up doing it better than you ever did. This happened to me with sales at RL Property Management. Seven years after starting the company, I finally turned over the reins on new business development, thinking there was no way that a salesperson with no property management experience could ever sell property management services (at my own company!) better than I could. I hired someone anyway, because I was starting to get overwhelmed with work and burnt out on sales — but I was not expecting much. Instead, sales exploded. To whit: in the nine months prior to hiring our salesperson, we closed 13 new clients. In the nine months afterward, we closed 47.

It’s amazing what happens when you get the right person in the right seat, and get out of the way.

THIS ISSUE IS PRESENTED BY LEADSIMPLE

Building A New Property Process in Realtime

I thought it might be valuable for me to share my thought process as I rebuild a new workflow from scratch, so I hit record and started talking out out.

In this recording you can watch me recreate our New Property process within LeadSimple (we previously used Process Street for this).

You’ll hear me talk through how I think about what the Stages of the process should be, and see me building each task. I hope this is helpful!

Sharing PM Horror Stories

Lindsay Liu’s (co-founder of Super) has a new podcast, “If These Walls Could Talk”. She asked me to share my worst property management horror stories. I reflected on 11 years of professional experience and shared a few of the worst:

• Finding something awful inside a freezer after an eviction

• A house rapidly filling up with natural gas

• Dog waste 4 inches thick throughout an entire home

Give it a listen here.

New Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• Here’s a property management company for sale near Philadelphia, PA (asking 450k).

• Here’s a property management company or sale in Oregon (160 doors, asking 475k).

• Here’s a software & marketing agency for sale, aimed at helping STR owners. Asking 9.8M.

Industry News and Events

• TCS Property Management, which manages around 5,000 doors, plans to acquire a 50% stake in Winston-Salem-based Piedmont Premier Property Management, known as P3. More info here.

• HOA management news: Westward360 has acquired Illinois-based ASF Enterprises. The combined entities will now collectively manage more than 750 community associations and employ more than 450 full-time employees.

• I’m on my 4-week Crane Break through the end of June (totally disconnected from my PM company). Expect shorter newsletters, and no issue the week of July 4th.

Closing Thought

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Stats from last week’s issue:

Valid Recipients: 9,912

Open Rate: 57.3%

Clickthrough Rate: 9.5%

Most Popular Link (148 clicks): RentScale BDM Scoreboard

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That’s all for this week! Have a great weekend. -Peter

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.