So first question to my, what effect has COVID-19 on your personal management processes, and what are the best practices, practices for managing remote team members.
So we were going over the questions we prepared for this. And I literally I was the first person was like, let's just strike this question right off the bat, because people are so tired of talking about COVID
He wouldn't let me talk about it in my head it's
true. Anyway, here in my glass panel box. To be honest, the reason I wanted to take it out is because I'm so tired of talking about it but it actually did something amazing for our team. You know, before that we had remote team members, but we didn't know what it was like to be a remote team member, and during COVID Especially during the startup COVID When everyone was remote in our office, we got a good sense of what it's like to be a remote team member, we got our entire team together on an open Zoom Room where we could hang out, and it was kind of cool to get a taste of what it was like to be what we call an international team member, and see what it's like to just only experience, our company virtually. So it really shaped the way that we meet now, with those items and how we you know, interact with them during our meetings, and making sure they're included, you know, so we do an onboarding day where we have a, you know, we take our team out to a five star dinner for any new employees, once a quarter. And we started, we started it with the items but we're not gonna like take them out to the steakhouse in Mexico. So but we started in, you know, finding a nice restaurant and sending him a gift card in advance so that they can do the same thing. So I think the biggest thing it did was taught us how to better influence culture with the, with the items the VA.
Yeah, a lot of times you don't understand until you walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. I think that's like, was a great learning and glad we decided to talk about that. I'm going to ask Todd the same question So what effect did you have on your virtual management processes, and what practices are your best practices for managing remote team members.
So, for us, there wasn't a huge transition after the whole lockdown and everything because we were already shifting towards that anyway, so I mean we already were pretty much 100% offshore except for leasing agents and business development people, so we basically just kept right on rolling, it was really easy for us I mean that's, it wasn't a whole lot of change. Now, something we have kind of tweak things a little bit we do what I actually took one of Mike's ideas and we have an all day Zoom meeting where people can get on so we have it set up with a meeting owl in our conference room so we can just walk in there anytime of the day, and talk to our remote team members just as if they were in the office. So we have kind of fine tune things as more time is going on, kind of tweeted just to make it work a little bit better for us to try to make it more like a normal office environment, but I mean it's already something that we were well underway on before COVID even came along.
I really love the idea of having like that open room, which can sometimes be great to get any, and also that having the video camera on 24 Seven is also not so great sometimes. What do you guys say, Have you ever had just like a team meeting or like from a tonight every morning or 815 to, you know 830 Every morning. Is that something you've been doing in Android I see you nodding your head.
You know, we did have daily stand ups when the rate of change was really fast. Before we got back kind of into our regular cadence. One thing I would offer for how people do digital meetings, is a lot of times meetings are about information transfer and solving for information gaps, and something we realized that we wanted to really use our meeting time for was, how do we create more connection and conversation amongst the team that's been missing for a lot of folks that have been asking for. And so we leverage zoom has breakout functionality where you can take. We have 250 people cross organization, and get on once a week on a Monday morning meeting, go over a core value, as an example of a week. And we pose a question, as opposed to executive just saying here's the core value and why it's important, why it should be important to all of you. It's asking a question like, when have you seen being relentlessly resourceful at its best. And then you get people into groups of four or five. They discuss that amongst themselves, and you get a lot of answers out from the team as you bring them back so technology's allowed us to do some things and engage people in different ways that we couldn't before. And we see people respond to that.
I did have another question, and it was for somebody who was unfortunately not able to, to make this panel so I'm going to throw it out to all of you. So, we all understand like the benefits, but I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into them, but maybe some challenges of having virtual assistants or remote work. Like what are the pitfalls that you're seeing, and maybe like how have you kind of overcome some of them in, in the last couple of years.
Well, I mean, obviously the biggest pitfall is if someone's not in your office it's, you know, if you don't have systems in place, then it's very difficult to make sure that everybody's staying on task, but things are getting done the way they're supposed to be, you know, it's really easy to walk down the hall and make sure that somebody is working, make sure that the you know that everything's getting done it's supposed to be there that they're actually at their desk doing their job. It's a little bit different when someone's in Guadalajara, you know it's just a completely different environment so you know you have to you have to have your systems locked down before you do this, you have to make sure you have KPIs, so you're able to actually track what people are doing and the work is actually getting done. So I mean it's, that's really the big pitfall is, if you don't have all that setup, it can be a mess, you know you're gonna find some really great people when you start to offshore, but you're also, you know, you run the risk if you don't have things set up that things can go off the rails if you don't have everything kind of lined up ready to go.
And so how are you tracking just on that, how are you tracking like all the tasks is it just by the KPIs like the end of measurement, or is there like an individual checklist or task management system that you're utilizing to say yes sir, this process is, you know 90% done.
So we're very checklist, focused, I was an airline pilot before I was in property management so checklists are life to me. As Christine knows I've got a checklist for everything. So I mean we're tracking everything as it goes along so everything gets automatically assigned to the right team so you know we're departmental based we're not individual based you know it's not a portfolio so everything gets assigned to the right team, and we can track all that so we also have we pay the developer to connect our process free checklist, which is our checklist system to HubSpot which we can have dashboard set up and monitor things, so you know we're tracking everything along the way and we also are tracking KPIs we're on EOS. Everybody's familiar if you're not familiar with EOS read the book traction. Very, very good thing to look into. But we're obviously monitoring our scorecard up through that. So you know it's process and KPIs I think is important. It can't just be one or the other.
Repeat all of the technology we're using,
we use process Street, and we also connect to HubSpot for that. And our BB primary property management software is property where which we're able to connect to everything because it has an open API,
like any other add ons to how you're tracking those pitfalls and overcoming them.
Yeah, so we kind of learned through trial and error on this. We have, we have small teams we have teams of three that handle portfolio so properties, copy that idea from Duke Johnson and Johnson property management. But basically, we wanted to give some support to the teams and we so we hired a ITM international team member for each one of those pots, but we didn't really assign tasks. And so, some of them were sitting there doing nothing, and other of them, do you know they were kind of doing whatever the team needed, but it wasn't very organized so eventually we developed what each ITM should be responsible for so a list of core duties that they have to, and it's much easier to track KPIs, like delinquency, if you've given them, you know, that specific they're charged with managing the delinquency and making, making sure it stays at the right number, just makes that scorecard process much easier to track so we also use traction and EOS. And I think we copied that from Matthew and a bunch of other people. So, yeah, yeah exactly so. I mean, weekly meetings. You had talked about it earlier. We do have each of those pods has their own level 10 meeting. And that's something that, if you get into traction you'll understand. And then we have daily huddles, which are you know basically five to 10 minute meetings where you're going over. Hey, what are your you know what was the best thing that happened to you yesterday. What are the top three things you need to focus on today, you know, what are you doing to grow personally, just quick hits, you know, small groups of five to 10, you know, five to six people. And it takes five to 10 minutes to roll through those things, but then it makes sure you start out your day with like a core list of tasks that here's the top three things I need to focus on.
I'm actually going to go back to the benefits of using virtual management, just because I think, like I said, maybe a third of people were doing it so far. So, economics, right, this is, we are in a business so you know tell me a little bit about like what you've seen maybe metrics wise or growth wise. When you implemented virtual managers call centers, or other remote employees, like what did you get the most bang for your buck on.
So I'm just talking about economics in general a lot of people don't know just exactly how much money can be saved here, so I mean just starting with that I know Robert Gilstrap is somewhere around there Robert hires or, you know, directly and pays what $4 An hour I think for a lot of employees Robert in Mexico. Yeah, so $5 an hour I mean that's kind of the idea of what you can get if you can hire direct we hire through Anicon which is a staffing agency that does this through Mexico. We pay on average about $8 $8.50 an hour, so I mean that's kind of what you're paying, when you start to offshore so you know if you're used to paying $27 an hour for somebody who is, you know, straight out of high school or college, what we're getting is someone at $8 An hour who has two master's degrees and is working on their PhD. So that's kind of the difference in what you're able to find when you start to do this so, you know, talking about the benefits of that, when you know, for example, our director of operations is in Mexico, so I know that sounds kind of crazy to people who haven't offshored before that you're the person who's running your entire operation isn't in your office, but it works great for us it was someone who was our maintenance coordinator before he kind of worked his way into it, he's, he has, I believe, two bachelor's degrees a master's degree and he's working on his PhD in engineering. So I mean that's the quality of individual you can get so you can only imagine for someone who's a Director of Operations having that kind of skill set that education. It really can elevate your operation, so you know you get a quality of individual that you would never be able to get in the States, because if you tried to hire that person here, you'd be paying them, $150,000 a year, so it just doesn't work for the operation, especially when we're trying to compete with larger players who are just starting to scale and get the the economies of scale, you know, you really have to be able to drive your costs down on labor. I don't think the profit coaches here but they'll tell you that your most important driver of profitability is your direct labor efficiency rating. That's how much bang for your buck, you're basically getting for your labor, so you have to have the lowest possible labor cost.
Going to second nature, Andrew, so you have a lot of 250 I think you said employees with a company that are all remote What do you think the benefits of having a you know diverse remote workforce, bring first productivity benefits or any other benefits that that work for second nature.
Yeah, so I had a couple of things come to mind. I don't remember the year of the Olympic Games, that it was but there's a relay and the Japanese relay team won the silver medal, and they were very much an underdog. And when they looked at that they said, Well hey how did you do this, and they said we focused exclusively on the handoff. And I think it's a benefit of like the biggest been one of the biggest benefits for us has been speed. As an organization, because, you know, when I have an end of the day meeting with Jody, and it's the beginning of her day. You just think about taking your typical 40 hour work week. That's across five weekdays, right and compressing that into the course of a couple of days, right 48 hours if you have an international team, so you can get into this nice rhythm of a team hands off certain work at the end of the day, it's the beginning of the day for the next team, they're handing off at the end of their day. And I love coming to my inbox and seeing what's been accomplished and down and picking it up and taking it up from there. So that's been one of our big benefits at second nature. And I think the other thing is just calling out the labor environment that we're in right now a lot of people are struggling to fill talent at different roles, there's a lot of jobs available at all different levels of talent. And, you know, looking at talent, outside of the city that you're in, and being able to go to go wider helps you have a broader pool to work from and help you fill critical roles more quickly. I think that's a big challenge for a lot of people right now. Agreed, agreed.
So, when we were chatting a week or two ago Todd you used a phrase that really stuck with me. And if you first Automate, you know, tell us about like that whole phrase I think you kind of like live by this automation versus outsourcing and then, you know, what's your plan on the automation piece and if not outsource.
Yeah, I mean that's kind of been our philosophy for a few years now is you know that our first goal is to automate anything we possibly can. If it can't be automated, then we'll outsource it if it can't be outsourced, that's the only time we're actually going to bring a person on in the United States. That's the only reason that it really justifies it in our view so automation is always the goal, straight up so you know I would say if you want to focus on anything first focus on automating as much of your operation as you can. Automation is always cheaper than even offshore labor for the most part, so you know that's what we focus on we're extremely automated that's why we use HubSpot process st Zapier so many different technology solutions, we can automate so much, create a much better customer experience by doing that. But once we, you know, try to automate something you know not everything can be automated and sometimes someone has to actually answer a phone, unfortunately. So when we do that, that's when we start to look to offshore, we go to Mexico we have call centers. They handle our leasing they handle our maintenance. So that's when we start to go to that and then only after that we start to look at hiring someone in the United States and that's why the only people that we really have are the boots on the ground people, those are only United States employees so that's our leasing agents in our biz deaf people. Everything else can pretty much be automated or it can be outsourced, you can have all of your phone calls answered by somebody, somewhere else, they don't need to be sitting in an office where you are in the United States so that's kind of our philosophy.
So, if somebody was just starting to get into the automation and outsourcing, what advice on maybe the top two things that you would take a look at automating first like what are the two maybe like workflows or processes that make sense to automate
leasing is definitely number one you got to automate your leasing process First of all, you're going to, you know, we use tenant Turner highly recommend them. There's several different solutions out there that deal with leasing automation, once you record that if you look at your, if you do an analysis of your phone calls that come into your company 90 plus percent of it is going to be leasing related if you're still doing everything in house that's where all of your call volume is after that it's maintenance so that's the second thing I would focus on is, is outsourcing and automating your maintenance operation we use property meld. For our software for that, but for both of these things we also have call centers, so we have an outsourced call center for our leasing hotline, nobody at my company answers a leasing phone call. If a phone call gets to Christine or me or somebody else at the company on a leasing issue, I want to find out how that got does and I want to snuff that out so it doesn't happen again. That's just, it's completely useless especially in this environment where we know we've, we've also we talked earlier today about how quickly you can get a property lease because the market is so hot. There's no reason to be having a person in the United States answering phone calls for leasing that can all be automated. So those are the two things I would focus on automate your leasing that automate your maintenance, and, you know, you can start working from there. Great, I disagree.
i actually fully agree, believe it or not, we are in so there's no one on our team right now we're looking for the person who's really into the tech and automation side of things. So if anybody knows anybody out there, we're having trouble hiring. But we, we looked at partners to I have on property milled stocks right now. It took me five years of partnership would probably melt because the socks. But anyway, love, love them, also we use call centers as well. So we use easy repair, along with property mountain they're actually right next to each other at a booth out there and they sit they swear they didn't line that up, but
they paid me for
that little color. No, nobody really paid, you know, if anybody wants to chat about it I'm happy to talk about it. But Andy Shin over at easy repair made my life a lot better for those of you who are smaller companies out there, I was on call every single weekend, you know, and on call 24 Seven, what happened was my business partner went on a cruise, gave me the on call phone, he's like here you take it, and then I was on call from then on. So, you know, I'd be out on the boat on the weekend and I get a call about an AC and an angry owner and all that kind of stuff. Property node in easy repair have literally eliminated 99% of those calls and so first thing to automate absolutely I would pick that and then we use. We happen to use tend to turn around. Also, and love those guys. They're great. We use their call center as well. And it just makes life so much easier when you're, it just makes sense when you're, if you're, if you're using people's boots on the ground to Lisa home or an apartment or a condo. If they're showing like they should be, then they can answer their phone so that phone call just goes to voicemail. And if you want to like shop your competitors just go and call their listings on Zillow or Trulia hot pads, in 99 95% of the time they don't pick up their phones tend to Turner's there every single time. And then, Twitter's actually trying to automate it as well. They're trying to be to text because people are a lot better at texting than they are answering their phones. So I highly recommend both of those solutions. There's a number of other solutions out there if you want to try out different ones, but if you're interested in talking about any of them, I would be happy to talk to you about it because they're, they're great solutions, and I am not tech savvy at all.
And that's actually a really good point about the availability, you know, when you have leasing agents answering phone calls if they're not able to take those calls, you know, also with the call center you have expanded call hours to I mean I know for us. If someone wants to call us about a property and they see listed at three o'clock in the morning on Christmas Eve, they're going to get somebody on the phone to talk to about that listing and telling them how to schedule a showing. And they will actually be able to go and do a self showing of that property, on Christmas day if they want to without anybody from our company having to have anything to do with it. That's really the big benefit of implementing these kind of solutions is nowadays everything is about instant gratification, we all know it because we all do it, you know, you go on, you're going to think of something later today you want to buy and what are you going to do you're going to get on Amazon, You're gonna order it's going to show up tomorrow or possibly even in some markets today, they're trying to get it to the point where same day delivery, everything is instant gratification, nobody wants to talk to a person, and schedule a showing four days from now, that doesn't really fit into their schedule because they have to go to work, you know, it's, that's just not today's environment, you know, you really need to cater to the customer and what they're looking for is being able to schedule stuff on their time and not have to worry about normal business hours.
And I'm going to ask you something around automation.
