Success Story: New PM Company
If you’ve been subscribed to this newsletter for a bit, you may remember when I offered up some free coaching spots to any property management companies with 10 or more doors. This is how I met Brandon Ngati, founder and CEO of Four Seasons Property Management.
After graduating college in May of 2020, Brandon was looking for ways to quickly adapt to the new landscape the pandemic was quickly carving. He began to keep his eyes out for investment properties, believing that they were a more stable opportunity amidst the turbulence COVID was causing. That led him to buy his first triplex at the start of 2021. He lived in one of the units and retained the tenants in the other two. Self-managing his tenants gave Brandon a lot of perspective and direct experience. From there, he encouraged his cousin to purchase a rental property of her own with the promise that he would manage it since he was doing it for himself anyway. She became his first client with a quadplex.
The next two years Brandon found himself splitting his focus between bidding contracts for managing and maintaining local properties and managing the multifamily units for himself and his cousin. At the start, taking on the risk and responsibility of an end-to-end property management company felt too daunting. Taking the risk for himself and his family was one thing, but for strangers, it was entirely different. After dividing his time without real results, Brandon realized that the contracts he was bidding for wouldn’t be something he could scale into a true service-based business. That’s when he took the time to reflect and decided to zoom in on managing multi-family units.
Even once he made the commitment to grow and operate Four Seasons Property Management, Brandon found himself turning away lead after lead. While the leads may have been qualified, Brandon wasn’t certain he could deliver as a true property manager as opposed to the contractor maintaining the property. That doubt was still there.
Part of Brandon’s reflection on why he was turning property owners away was realizing he didn’t have a good handle on the type of entrepreneur he was. I find this to be a commonality among entrepreneurs, and as long as you’re the kind of person who’s started their business (and most of you reading this have), you’ll fall into one of three categories:
Visionary - the leader who sees things on the horizon and drives the company towards change.
Operator - the leader who focuses inward to build the systems and processes into a flywheel to allow the company to grow continually.
Innovator - the leader who thinks in ways no one else does and brings wild ideas into an industry where they don’t seemingly fit.
Each of these archetypes has their own skill set. Visionaries find ways to keep companies relevant as landscapes change. Operators make sure the company is profitable and efficient. Innovators find areas of opportunity no one could dream of.
They also have their own challenges. Visionaries see paths forward that can be difficult to translate and can cause friction among existing infrastructure. Operators are laser-focused on the inside of the company and want to perfect for the current environment. Innovators are willing to take wild swings to find proof of concept.
Building teams and infrastructure to support the kind of entrepreneur you are is critical to the success of the company. It’s also an important and valuable skill to constantly develop. In a perfect world, every company has one of each type at the helm.
I personally fit into the Operator camp. Brandon has also discovered he fits into the Operator type and has been able to dig down and give himself the foundation he requires to grow Four Seasons Property Management. As systems thinkers, Brandon and I speak the same language and get along very well.
So when it comes time to make new hires, we often focus on areas of weakness. One of my first hires was for sales, and it was a game-changer for me. As RL grew, I shored up areas that allowed me to focus on where my impact is the biggest based on the kind of entrepreneur I am. Brandon is walking that same path himself and strongly encourages anyone under 20 doors to take a good, hard look at the kind of entrepreneur you are so you find your critical path forward and can make informed hires.
This way, strengths, and weaknesses are easier to identify and support through either staff or the tech you leverage internally. For example, hiring a forward-thinking marketer to bring leads to your extroverted salesperson, who is then supported by your detail-oriented leasing staff, gives you a strong sales pipeline to grow the business. As the Operator archetype, it’s then my job to start building the processes to maintain these clients and their units through strategic hires and appropriate tech.
Speaking of tech, here’s the full tech stack he used to double his business:
Buildium
Tenant Turner (according to Brandon, this was his biggest game changer. He was “operating in the stone age before this platform.”)
LeadSimple
SecondNature (insurance)
JIRA and Confluence (work management and Company Wiki)
With the tech stack that works for the company, processes to support the onboarding of new units, and to train new hires, Four Seasons Property Management doubled in size in one year and has a confident CEO in Brandon.
Now, at the start of 2024, Brandon has 22 doors under management.
However, make sure you find the tech stack that works for you. Most of you know that I use Notion for a lot of my documentation and training. Brandon has found that JIRA works best for him. Your tech stack has to work for you and your team instead of being the “right” solution.
One of the other dial movers for Brandon was leveraging ChatGPT to document all of his processes. Use the paragraph prompt to build the SOPs, including as many key points in the prompt as you can. Then, ChatGPT will spit out a highly detailed, step-by-step document that you can review and adjust as necessary.
This is something I’ll be trying. It’s a great way to make sure none of the detail is missing in an SOP. That way, as we continue to grow our team and bring on new hires, we’ll have solid documentation of a process or procedure to train them. It’s also a great way to make sure we can get those processes documented if we do happen to change a big piece of the company's operations. Whether that’s a new platform or having to address a new legal requirement, getting the core of it documented in minutes as opposed to dedicating a staff member to start from a blank document is a great time saver.
Where is he headed? By the end of 2024, Brandon’s goal is 200 doors under management and $500k in revenue with unit turns happening in 28 days or less.
Key takeaways for anyone under 20 doors:
Build your company for the kind of entrepreneur you are and
Find people to backfill areas you aren’t an expert in (and don’t want to be)
Be responsive and knowledgeable when prospective clients reach out