A Podcast | Brian Birdy

Pete Neubig: Welcome back everybody. And as promised, I have one of my mentors, Brian Birdy. As you all know from the intro, Brian was the national, NARPM president back in 2017, 2018?

Brian Birdy: 18.

Pete Neubig: 2018. So, Brian, thank you so much for being here today.

Brian Birdy: Hey, I'm glad to be here. I love my NARPM family.

Pete Neubig: Alright. And talking about NARPM family, you give a ton back to NARPM. So for somebody who's given that much to NARPM, national president, local president, instructor, all that good stuff. How has this affected your business, and more importantly, how has it affected you personally?

Brian Birdy: NARPM changed everything for me. It really did. It's very, you know, a lot of people go, how is that possible? But, I mean, you know, I was struggling in a business that my dad started. He basically was just taking care of his friends houses. That was pretty much all it was. And with very little guidance, there was hardly any property management education that I could find. I was starving for education when I found NARPM, and I really found it in a desire to get better educated, to learn what I was doing. And when I found NARPM and realized there were designations, there was education classes. I dove in head first. And everywhere I went. I mean, I took classes all over the country. I went to a bunch of different events in different places because I just wanted to learn, learn, learn because I knew I didn't know everything. Um, and then I didn't necessarily take everything exactly the way someone shared it and came back and put it in the same way. But I learned from each place I went that I could come back and run my business a little bit smarter. And so I adapted it to my way of thinking. You know, I always tell people, I did not create very many things. I just adapted all things I learned by going to NARPM events, Listening to a NARPM instructor, taking the education. And I mean through that, I built a business that kept growing, that knew how to grow. And then I learned how to actually make money. I mean, I grew this company for a long time and still didn't make any money, and it took three classes of people educating about making sure that we charge what we're worth. Quit giving everything away for free. You know, figuring out what people were willing to pay for and putting a price for it. So both growth, profitability. And then when I started serving, I just learned how to be a leader. You know, I mean, I have a lot of leadership things in my background. I was in the military, I did certain things. But, you know, a business leader in this business and being able to understand and lead my team and communicate with government officials and with owners and with vendors, I mean, all those things are skills. You just gotta learn how to do it. Right. And I think taught me a lot of this through all those pieces. So when I look back, I go, I give NARPM full credit. I have my NARPM stickers on the front door of my thing for every year since I've been a member, and the list is pretty big now. And then I have it on my license plate. My license plate is five letters N-A-R-P-M, and, uh, and I give him full credit on, you know, the business individual that I am today. I doubt I ever would have been if I didn't find him and my business. There's no way it grew into what it did. Now, it's not solely NARPM. Like, oh, you joined up and you're guaranteed these things, but NARPM put me on the right direction, guided me, made connections where I could talk to people, learn from them. I mean, and then I had to do the hard work myself, but I think I would have been lost without NARPM.

Pete Neubig: What would you say to people that say, man, I really want to give back to him, but I really don't have the time?

Brian Birdy: Well, this business, you'll never have time for anything. You won't have time to work out. You won't have time to grow. You won't have time to return phone calls if you don't make it. And I'll tell you right now. Making the time to be part of your NARPM organization is extremely. I continue to try to find ways that I can give back. I'm still a national instructor. I still focus on giving back. I love being able to teach in this, and so you have to make the time. And if you really want to change your business, make the time to get your designations. The process of getting your designation will walk you through all the steps for you to look at your business and say, am I really running the best business that I can? When I took the CRMC checklist and sat down at my desk and went down it and realized I didn't know some of the items that were listed there, I mean, I didn't know what they were. I mean, how and I'm about to try to go get my CRMC. And there's a part of the checklist that says, I'm supposed to be doing this. And I'm like, I don't even know what this is. I had to go, right? And I'm like, okay. So and then there were things that asked, do you have this? And I'm like, I don't have that. I don't have this. You realize, right? I mean, I remember coming back from my very first NARPM meeting and my dad was like, so what'd you learn? I said, well, I learned if we keep doing business the way that we are, you and I are both going to jail. That's what I learned, you know? And so, I mean, that's the starting point. And then you continue to learn, I mean, so service by serving in it, by going to the meetings, you're going to learn how to be a better property manager, a better business owner, a better leader. Well, it doesn't happen by yourself. Being busy on a calendar and not making the time. You have to make the time for it. And believe me, it's for yourself. I have NARPM friends all over this country that would not exist if it wasn't for my involvement. And the payoff is that happens. I mean, I just had a NARPM crowd fly out from Georgia to come, and they spent the weekend at my house and we went to the Texas Georgia game, and we had an absolutely fantastic time. And, you know, those are things that, I mean, that helps build the business. I mean, that rejuvenates you. You talk about business while you're together. You have fun together. You go to the football game together. Unfortunately, Georgia won. I had to drive home with all these Georgia fans in the car. But, you know.

Pete Neubig: I think, um, one of the things that I realized when I served was that, like, if you're just a member of NARPM, you're already in the ten percentile of all property managers in the country. You know? And if you're giving leadership, evidently, there's a statistic out there that says only about 10% of all members give back to an organization. And NARPM is no different. And what I felt was that I was hanging out with the 1% of property managers in the country, and you're the average of the five people you hang out with the most. And so by my association with those folks, I became one of the, you know, I feel like one of the top five percenters in the country in property management just by, you know, serving and hanging out with with high quality folks.

Brian Birdy: I mean, you think about it. I mean, I give credit all the way back to Marty Hutchinson from San Antonio. Marty is the one who came to me. And I'm telling you, the only reason he came to me was I went to the convention. There were so few people from San Antonio at that time that actually I went to the convention in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I came back and he called and said, hey, I want to talk with you. And he was like, we'd like you to get involved in leadership. And I'm like, me. I was brand new, right? And and I just joined and I went to my first convention. But he was like that investment of my time by going to the convention, told them that this was somebody they wanted to work with.

Pete Neubig: Yup.

Brian Birdy: And I think about it, you know, from doing that, I got to work hand in hand with Steve Foster, Kevin Knight, and I'm like, you know, they had me. That's right here locally. Then I get involved nationwide and I'm working with Bart Sterzel and and John Bradford, you know.

Pete Neubig: All OGs.

Brian Birdy: And you props, you know, who are all like and you're like you learn from hanging around for them and watching them be leaders and the things they did and the things they're doing with their businesses. Those things go. You come back and find a way to make a difference in your business. If you want to grow it, to make it its best. It takes time. It takes commitment.

Pete Neubig: You know, when I was going to do my first ever Ironman triathlon, it was like, I didn't know how to even begin. Kind of like what? Your CRMC list. And, uh, I didn't even know if I could complete it, let alone, you know, do well in it. And what I started doing is I started hanging out with people who have done 10, 15, 20 Ironman triathlons, and they just kind of paved the way for me. And my mindset shifted from, can I complete it? To how fast can I complete it? And, uh, and so I think it's the same kind of concept when you hang out with business owners, hang out with the folks that you want to be like, right. And so, um, typically those people who are serving are typically people who are running an running an incredible business. High profit margin. Most likely a high door count. And if that's where you want to get to, then those are the easy, easy people to hang with. And they become they become not only just, you know, affiliates, but they become friends, like you said. Mhm. All right. So let's I'm going to switch gears here. Lately you have been speaking a lot about the importance of guarantees. By the way I've told you this off the air, but I'll tell you on the air as well. You're one of my favorite people to listen to speaking at NARPM events. Uh. You're crazy wealth of knowledge. But you also do it. You're super funny and you're just enjoyable. So not only do I get a good chuckle or two. I also always have like five pages of notes whenever you speak. And so I saw you twice recently over the last year speaking about guarantees. So why are you so passionate about guarantees? How do we create them and discuss some of your guarantees? Let's just talk guarantees for a little bit.

Brian Birdy: Alright. So you know, when you look at, I mean, I'm in Texas, most of us use the same property management agreement. It's the Texas Association of Realtors forum. I know some people get away from that because they want to be different, but I like having that that organization and that that paperwork behind me to know that I'm doing everything correctly, it just makes so much sense. But then you're like, how are you going to be different than everybody else? You know, when you all have the same, exact same property management agreement, then the only thing you really have different is price. And I don't want to be competing on price with people. So I always thought a long time ago, we have to be visibly different to everybody else. And I felt as as I grew in this business and I watched things changing around me in property management, I realized that being different and being able to show the difference and the value of being different was more important than being better. You can tell somebody, you're better, how are you going to how are you going to quantify it? But I can tell you I'm different and I can show you. And that's very attractive. And as I started building my guarantees, I said, people like guarantees. I mean, you think about it. What's the greatest guarantee about Amazon? Why is everybody so comfortable getting anything from Amazon? What's the guarantee? Pete.

Pete Neubig: What is it the same day delivery.

Brian Birdy: And no. But what's the guarantee they give you?

Pete Neubig: Oh, the guarantee on Amazon. No. You get your money back or something like that.

Brian Birdy: You don't like it, you send it back, you give it back. It made it so easy. You can go to Whole Foods and just turn it in, no questions asked. So you are never at risk. See, people buy, but they're always fearful of risk. Their fear is what stops them from doing things. So I thought guarantees is a great way to be different and a great way to get rid of fear. When a person has a fear and you can give them a guarantee, that alleviates it. Amazon's big fear was no one wants to order all this crazy stuff and have it delivered their house, be stuck with it, not know what to do with it. So they said fine, you don't like it, you send it back free, no cost immediately. Then they made it even easier. So what can we do? How can we be different? We need to give a guarantee, right? Think about Zappos. Right. They were like. Or Zappos. What is it? What's the shoe company?

Pete Neubig: Zappos. Yeah.

Brian Birdy: Zappos, right. Zappos. Big giant. No one's going to buy shoes they can't try on. Now, remember today it's second. It's like we all think. We don't even think twice about today. But go back when they first started. How are you going to create this online shoe business where no one gets to try the shoes on? But their guarantees were, you don't like the shoe, you send it back, you find it cheaper. We'll give you the you'll give you the difference. So guarantees affect how people buy things. Why are we any different? We're not. We offer guarantees right now in property management. And people who are listening to this and say, I don't have any guarantees. Yes you do. You guarantee things right now, you just don't take credit for it. The most simplest guarantee that we always had was if we're not collecting rent, we don't get paid a management fee. We always said it was never written anywhere. We said it. People believed it, they saw it, it was happening. But now we have a guarantee behind that. We guarantee. I think it's called the results guarantee. Until your house is rented, we don't make any money. Right? It's a guarantee. And I'm telling you that people see that so dramatically different. So now we have 15 guarantees. They're all free to the owner. And they all do one of three things. They either make it easier to hire me. They guide the owner in the actions I want them to be guided in or they make me money. And that's it. And people love guarantees, especially when they're afraid and you back them up. And most of my guarantees are the things. Where are we doing? I have a Spanish speaking guarantee. If you call my company and you want to speak in Spanish, no matter what question you have department you talk to, you can speak Spanish. Now, what does that cost me today?

Pete Neubig: Oh, a lot less than somebody. Yeah.

Brian Birdy: Where are all my remote team members located at.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, Mexico.

Brian Birdy: It's a primary. Now, I have a lot of Spanish speaking owners and Spanish speaking tenants, and they like this. Now the end result is I made the guarantee. Because. Why? It was fun to have a guarantee. I wanted to say this was true. We're doing this and it was free. It's never going to cost me any money to do it. What I didn't realize was it made an impact on the real estate agents in my market who were working with Spanish speaking investors, who said, I need a property manager. And they're like, well, I'm going to send you to Bertie because they have a Spanish speaking guarantee. I didn't build it for that reason, but that was the result that came from that. Every single guarantee I have is guided to, like I said, that helps me grow because now other people want to send their investor my way.

Pete Neubig: And the guarantee when it's created, it should be something that either A you're already doing or B that you can pretty, you can do pretty easily. Correct. Like it's like you don't want to bend over backwards to try to have to try to hit a guarantee. Is that?

Brian Birdy: No, no. The first thing we did, we came up with 37 guarantees. We got crazy, man. We had a brainstorming session. Now we only have 15, but we came up with 37. Some of them were pretty crazy. We're like, well, we can't guarantee that. But it was like, why not open your brain up? So the first thing we started with was, what are we already pretty much guaranteeing? What do we tell everybody? Oh yeah, this is what happens. But it's not really in writing. It's not contractually obligated. But we will live to it. We will own it. But we didn't call it a guarantee. So that was where you started. What are you already guaranteeing that you're not getting credit for? And then from there we were like, where are the fear points? For example, we're like, I have to remember how they all work now I got you think I'd have these on the top of my head, right? But it's like. You know, simple things like happiness guarantee for any reason you're not happy. You can leave. Give me 30 day notice. So we just started signing 30 day contracts. Now, remember, I'm a legacy company. I'm never going to sell my company, so I don't have to worry about this. If you're a building, a company you want to sell, maybe you don't want a 30 day management agreement with everybody on 30 days 30 days because you want the longevity. But for us, I who wants to sign a contract, you want to go sign a contract with anybody right now if your cell phone company came and said, I'll give you a great deal, but you got to sign a two year contract with me. You're real happy about that?

Pete Neubig: No.

Brian Birdy: No. Our market, we have to pay attention to the people we're dealing with. Our market says they don't like contracts. So I said, let's get away from the contract. Let's just do a 30 day and tell them you can leave whenever you want. I think I've had one owner ever use the happiness guarantee and leave.

Pete Neubig: I think the other thing too is like, if somebody is unhappy, why would you want to keep them? Why do you want to stick around like, oh, you're unhappy, but you have another eight months with us like that.

Brian Birdy: I used to make them sign a contract and tell them they had to pay me to leave. Right.

Pete Neubig: Right.

Brian Birdy: And now I'm like, no contract ends in 30 days. There's no money for you to leave. And. And I've had less problems with owners this way because I can fire them in 30 days. They can fire me in 30 days. When we're on equal playing ground. And here remember this when they know they can leave on day one. In 30 days, you have lowered the risk and the fear of them hiring you, right?

Pete Neubig: Am I going to go with Birdy that I only have like 30 days? I can punch out anytime and not pay a fee?

Brian Birdy: That's it.

Pete Neubig: Or can I go with ABC management where they're going to lock me into a year contract? And if I'm not happy, I'm stuck.

Brian Birdy: So when they're comparing those two, I become more appealing when they come in. And then now it's our job to keep them happy. The happiness guarantee gives them the right to leave. All I gotta do is keep them happy. Our owners mad at me sometimes. Sure. Do we make mistakes we have to make up for? I try not to. With very few lately, but they still happen. The trick is, they hired me because they could leave early, and then they realize they don't really want to leave.

Pete Neubig: One guarantee that I heard you speak about. I don't know if you still have it, but I loved it. Was the you're gonna get somebody back in 24 hours. But everybody thinks 24 hours means, 24 hours. Like so if it's 2 p.m. today, I got an answer by 2 p.m. tomorrow. But your guarantee basically said it's 24 working hours. Talk a little bit about that.

Brian Birdy: So it's called the response guarantee and it's written out. Every guarantee is in writing. They all get it and they sign it with their agreement. So this is not like a.

Pete Neubig: It's not just on the website. It's actually a page.

Brian Birdy: They actually physically sign it. Yeah. And so it says that we strive to be readily available to our landlords and quick to respond to owner communication at any time. An owner is not responded to by a member of PMI Brady Properties team. Within 24 business hours, the landlord will receive a credit to their account equal to that month's management fee. Basically says now think about this. How many times have you in your history out there talking to owners? They said, well, my current property manager never calls me back.

Pete Neubig: All the time.

Brian Birdy: Been trying to reach him.

Pete Neubig: Why people leave is lack of communication.

Brian Birdy: That's why I created this guarantee. I said, that's not us. So let me give a guarantee now. I needed to be reasonable. So I wrote it as 24 business hours, which if you think about it, it's really three days. And honestly, if I don't respond to you in three days, you should fire me. So when you build a guarantee, just build one you're willing to live with and you're willing to pay for. Now, I don't think I've had anyone ever. I had one person threaten to fire me for this, and I and of course, I had to fire an employee because when I got into research, I had a leak I had to go fix.

Pete Neubig: Yup.

Brian Birdy: But this is one of those ones. It's another way for them to feel more comfortable. Get rid of the fear of who they're hiring. And then it's just us to perform, and it's easy. The goal is we look so appealing through the guarantees they want to work with us. Now it's our job to deliver on the guarantees. Well, I got to do here is answer their phone calls and answer their emails. We're supposed to be doing that anyway.

Pete Neubig: Right. Right. So a couple of things that are great takeaways if you're listening to this be better, not different. That is so powerful. Right.

Brian Birdy: Other way around. Reverse it.

Pete Neubig: Oh, sorry. Be different, not better. Sorry about that. Yes. Be different, not better. Which is if you're just going to be better. A lot of times that's the race to the bottom, right. You're just going to you're just going to lower your. You're going to keep lowering your fee to the point where you're you're you're not profitable.

Brian Birdy: So think about it. How do you prove it? How do you prove you're better? It's hard to prove you're better. It's very easy to prove you're different.

Pete Neubig: Interesting. Yeah. And then I still love the response guarantee. It was when you said it. It was such a aha moment to me because we had this 24 hour, you know, 24 hour like response. And we were doing it like 24 hours expecting my team to work eight, nine, 10:00 at night to respond to emails, whatever this response, 24 business hours gives you three days. And you're right, 99.x% should be respond to within three days. Yeah. Awesome. All right. I'm going to I'm going to spin it. I'm going to take a left turn here. You said you took over your business from your father years ago, and now your children are involved in your business. So can you give our listeners any guidance on running a business with your family? Like some good, some bad or anything in between? Or have you set up like what's going to happen, like legacy. Like you're going to move on and your kids have moved up. Like what's what's going on over there at PMI Birdy Properties right now?

Brian Birdy: So my dad owned the business, ran the business for about 20 years before I came here. I came to work for him because he had grown it up, because him and my uncle had teamed up and they were going to do it together. My uncle, unfortunately got liver cancer, passed away, and then my dad ended up with basically too much work and didn't really want to hire people. I came to work for him just to kind of bring him to modern days. He was doing everything out of a out of a three ring binder. At that point, I needed to teach him what an Excel spreadsheet was, and we needed to figure out how to automate a little bit.

Pete Neubig: This is even before the days of Appfolio, right?

Brian Birdy: This is 1997, right? This is 97. I meanm you know, family business. I think there's a lot of benefits. One of the big benefits is it's their name on the building with you, right? But you have to invest in your family, right? You got to make sure your family are well educated. They are well motivated. They understand what they're doing. You got to train them. You have to invest in them so that they will be. Because just because they're your family doesn't mean... You got to find the right seat for them to be on to be successful, too. Okay? Just because of your family doesn't mean they're you, and it doesn't mean they're going to do everything the same way as you. So, you know, you have to deal with that. You have to deal with family relationships at the office. If we don't really deal with that a lot here, you know, I mean, everyone kind of knows where they're at. And there is some trick, tricks here.

Pete Neubig: Is that always the case, though, Brian? Or did you have to find did you have to like did you learn some of this? Like you put maybe Greg in a bad spot. He it wasn't his spot that he really needed to be.

Brian Birdy: I kind of led them all. Finding the people. I mean, you know, so imagine my family is my three kids, my niece, my brother, my daughter in law. I mean, figuring out where they could be successful, helping build a program around them to make them do it. I've done that with a number of them. My brother kicks butt in vacation rentals. I mean, it is his world. He is very good at it. You know, Russell's running the association part. Everyone is, Lorena kills it as business development, you know, director of business development. You know. Well, they've all did a lot of things before they got to that point. At one point in time, they were all, you know, basically leasing agents, you know, and responsible for a third of the city and stuff. So we had to learn how to grow this. But, you know, it's interesting. You got to treat everybody appropriately. You know, people have been promoted in this job that aren't family, that hold positions equal to these guys, that aren't family. But you deal with a lot of that one. You got to deal with your own family and the family dynamics, which isn't always the easiest. I mean, it isn't even us, right? They got to figure out how to get along. Sometimes. You don't. You don't always get along with your kids at every moment when you're working with them all day long, or your wife or anybody else. Right.

Pete Neubig: Can make for an interesting thing, can make for an interesting family dinner. Right.

Brian Birdy: Oh yeah, we'll get to that one in a minute. But then you also have the fact that you have other people in the business who aren't family, and they have to realize, and you have to make sure they're feeling like they belong. They have as much opportunity to succeed and improve and move up. Just because their name is not Birdy doesn't mean that they're treated any differently. We've struggled with that over time and tried to learn ways to be able to do that.

Pete Neubig: Did you, uh, did you...

Brian Birdy: Change things when you are at home at the how does about sitting down at the dinner table and not talk about business?

Pete Neubig: Yeah. It's tough.

Brian Birdy: Yeah. Almost impossible. How about taking a family vacation?

Pete Neubig: You know, everybody's bringing their laptops with them, I'm guessing. Right.

Brian Birdy: Well, first off, you all can't go.

Pete Neubig: Right?

Brian Birdy: We all can't go.

Pete Neubig: That's right. Yeah.

Brian Birdy: We have a weekend. We do every. And we don't leave the state of Texas. We usually just drive to it. But we do a weekend where we all go together. So I get all my kids and all my grandkids Kids together, but usually they all take vacations at different times. And it's not a big family thing because we're all running the same business and all of us can't be gone at the same time.

Pete Neubig: Did you start off your kids? Kind of. Did they wear every hat in the organization just to kind of learn every aspect of it, or did you just find them like Lorena? Like she was. Was she a great BDM right from the beginning?

Brian Birdy: She did different things. They all did different things. So if you look at I mean, Greg went off, it's really interesting. So Greg went off to school. First off I told him, you either go join the military and grow up or you go to school and get educated, but you have nothing to offer me. So until you go do something and then come back. They all chose to go to school. I wish they'd all join the military. It would have been cheaper for me, but they all go to school to get educated, right?

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Brian Birdy: Greg went and got a degree in finance. He had come out of college with a real estate degree and a mortgage loan officer's degree, and he was going to go work for a mortgage officer for 18 months and then start his own mortgage brokerage as a side business for us. Of course, he graduates college in the summer of 2007.

Pete Neubig: Oh, yeah. Right before the...

Brian Birdy: It all blew up. And so he just said, well, I guess good thing I got a real estate license. But all, except for Jessica, everyone has worked in leasing. Like Lorena started started in maintenance. She ran maintenance for a while. She supported business development, and then she became the business development director. You know, Greg and Russell were leasing agents. They were showing houses and signing leases, you know, and marketing homes. I mean, I've structured and restructured and moved things around and as we grew, they have done many in most parts of it all. Where they're where their skill set is. I mean, Jessica got a degree in accounting. So clearly she's our accounting focus since she got here.

Pete Neubig: I think there's a lot of value. My uncle owns a food distributor company. They're really big now. And my cousins, you know, my age, he's in his 50s now and he's kind of running the running the place now, but he basically had every hat in that business which I believe made him a better leader today because he knows, you know, even from the guy that has to stock the shelves to the truck. I don't think he actually drove the trucks, but he he rode with them. So he knew what those jobs were. So he can kind of understand, you know, that the pain, uh, for some of those job roles.

Brian Birdy: Everybody has a unique role that they are very skilled and good at and everyone needs each other. That was kind of my focus, so that when I do completely step away and the organization will be, they will run it all together. But they all need each other. They all, you know, each one of them fill a piece of the pie and collectively together they can run all three of these pillars.

Pete Neubig: All right. Which a lot of people say you've kind of stepped away already. Uh, from from the business, the business kind of running without you, which is a great thing because you now are a pickleball guy. And you recently just purchased a pickleball franchise. So tell me what you did to set yourself up so that you can spend a lot of time and effort in building your next career. Next business. Like, how did you set PMI Birdy Properties up so that you can kind of exit?

Brian Birdy: When you look at it. I think a lot of it goes, I mean, I've always been trying to empower people, give them responsibility, learn how to delegate. I was the worst delegator when I first brought people into this business. I had to learn how to do that, I didn't think, I mean, I just had a hard time giving stuff up. That's something I learned over the last 20 years, and started finding ways to give them the ability to do it, have ways to check to make sure they do it. You know, trust and verify, trust and verify and guide them and let them celebrate and reward them along the way. And you can do so much more with everybody else around you than can ever do by yourself. But I didn't know that at first. I had to grow into that. I would say when I took the role, when I started serving in NARPM, that was step one. It required me to be away from the office at different times, and I had to start structuring things to happen without me. When I took the role as a vice president of residential for PMI and actually commuted to Utah for four years, that was a huge step that required me to structure a system where they could survive without me. I was on weekly meetings. I was still in planning sessions. I still was able to watch all my KPIs and see how things were going. But they started running that without me here. When I came back here, I didn't change a lot of that. I'm here. I'm a big cheerleader. Here is where I'm at now, and I still have meetings. I have meetings, I'm meeting with somebody almost every day of the week, you know. But I as I decided that I wanted to get into pickleball because I just saw a business opportunity here. And being early in this, I felt like it could be really great. I went and we had a giant family meeting. All the family came together and I said, here's what we're thinking about doing and here's what it might affect. And one of the questions was, well, if you grow this up and it's more fun and more profitable than property management, can some of us move over to that? So I was like, well, you never know. You know, we'll see what happens. You know. We had really structured in a way where they are all running this, and they come to me. I mean, I have, you know, procedural discussions and guidelines and decisions and, you know, software choices and vendor relationships and things on a regular, you know, what we want to do and sometimes I empower them and say, this is your baby, this is your issue. You solve it, you pick the right vendor, you come and tell us why and prove it to us, and then you can run the whole thing. But giving people the power to lead is what helps them be a leader if I solve all problems. But when they come to me now, I stop and go, okay, they need my help. Why is that? And we really dig into what is it? Usually it's the weird, the strange thing that and we all look at each other and go, How the heck did this happen? And this has never happened in 30 years, so I have the time to go out and do something different. But I'm still watching over. You can't leave your business alone. Think it's just going to run fine. I'm still out. I go out in the field. I do, at times I go out and check on a property. I can go meet with an owner. I can go see a tenant. I mean, I try to go and do all these things. So I never forget what's happening in the business. But day to day, this thing runs without me.

Pete Neubig: Do you look at, um...

Brian Birdy: Which is great. So do I get to go build pickleball locations? So I got my first one under lease, and everything's on track, and we should be opening in February. And I just met with my landlord of my second location, and we should be signing a lease here pretty soon.

Pete Neubig: That is awesome. Uh, do you have certain KPIs that you're looking at as the business owner versus when you were a little bit more in the weeds?

Brian Birdy: Well, I mean, currently, right now my biggest KPI is how many homes do we have in the market that's not rented?

Pete Neubig: Okay.

Brian Birdy: That's just that's just because the market conditions that we're at and more. And that's kind of a negative number. I we went in and I realized I kept asking for a negative number. So now when I walk in and go how many leases are we prepping to sign right now. And because that's a more positive number. So every day when I walk down I get the we have five new leases going out. We have seven new leases going out. Because I know that if those are going out, that other number is going to work its way down.

Pete Neubig: So in a year you..

Brian Birdy: I have weekly meetings. We run EOS and we have weekly meetings, and we have our dashboard. We do it a little different than EOS. We've kind of adapted the EOS to a to a Birdy way of doing it. We do our dashboard one week of the month. And then we do basically a KPI checklist by actual person, every single person or department, certain key things that we want to know from everyone. And they do a monthly reporting and we see how we're doing. And then from that is what leads us to our IDS discussions. Because once we see where we're at, we figure out what's stopping us from, you know, why are these numbers changing? And may sometimes we create new numbers and start reporting on those. And that keeps everybody in the company in a heartbeat as to what's actually happening. You know, we know how we're doing on leasing and renewals and evictions, and we know exactly what our delinquency percentages are. And, you know, when you're watching on that regularly, things don't get out of hand.

Pete Neubig: And then you have people that are held accountable. So they're the ones figuring out all the solutions to increase rent collections, decrease delinquency, increase the leasing. And it's not you that's solving those challenges. You're just asking the questions, and you're there to be a helpful mind.

Brian Birdy: And more than that, we go through a planning process where they bring me the number they think they want to work on for the year. I mean, and I had told them that, said that her goal was to be at 100% of this thing. And I looked and I said, you know, 100% is almost impossible for this. And she goes, I want to strive for 100 and see how close I can get. And I think at the year end, she's going to be at 85%.

Pete Neubig: Okay.

Brian Birdy: But what a dramatic growth. If we go back and look at last year's number, it was it was an ugly number. And now she's 85. The only reason she was 85 was, she set the goal. This was her number. She came up. She owned it. She worked her butt off. And here we are at the end of the year. She's going to make 85, maybe a little bit higher than that, but she's not going to make. I never thought she'd make 100. But honest with you, if she had told me 85, I'd have told her that was impossible.

Pete Neubig: Interesting. Because she went for a higher number. She got it.

Brian Birdy: Well yeah, well. And also I just empowered them and they came up with what they. And I had to agree with it, but they delivered where they thought they wanted to work all year on. And then throughout the year they had smaller steps that aided them to get there. And now we're about to have our planning session for next year, and they're going to that same goal isn't going to be it. They've already mastered that. What new are they going to bring to me. And I guarantee you, they will come to me with something much more bold than I could come up with myself.

Pete Neubig: Have you ever had anybody come up with a number that you thought was too low?

Brian Birdy: I challenge them. Sometimes I go, that's your job. Your number can't be your job. I come to work every day and I do this work and therefore I meet my number. I said, that's not a number. What? Were you being challenged? How are you going to make it better? How are you going to strive to change and make life better? And it's either right, providing better service, us being more efficient, making more money, making whatever it is. And they usually can figure out they know where the pain point is they want to fix. I love it when they fix it and it makes their life better. Boy, they're eager to go get that.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. One of the things that I tell my team, because we meet, you know, I meet with my team weekly and we go through the L10s, we use EOS. We use a modified version of EOS, right? Just like in property manager. Somebody tells you a great idea, you don't implement it exactly the way they said it. You made it the Birdy way, and I made it the VPM way or the Empire way or whatever business I'm running. But my the biggest question I ask my team is, well, what can I do to make your job easier? Like, that's that's really my job is to make their jobs easier. You know, what tools can I give you? And what can I do to make you hit your number and make your job easier?

Brian Birdy: And sometimes I just need to know they need that support. You'll be surprised what people can do for you. When I have all these people, all individually working on something throughout the quarter or throughout the year to make a difference is so much more than I ever could have come up with on my own.

Pete Neubig: I think given ownership to people is the number one thing. A matter of fact, I had a conversation earlier this afternoon with my business partner, and we were talking about, you know, a couple of guys that we have at VPM and we're just talking about, man, they embody taking ownership. And that's kind of one of our big core values, right? Taking ownership. And when you have somebody that takes ownership, you need to really like keep those folks because those are the superstars. Those are the people that are going to propel your business to greater heights.

Brian Birdy: Yep.

Pete Neubig: All right, Brian, we're going to take a quick commercial break. And then I'm going to hit you with the the lightning round.

Brian Birdy: Uh oh.

Pete Neubig: All right. We'll be right back, everybody. All right, we're back. We got Brian Birdy, mentor, speaker, past president, and pickle baller on the hot seat for the lightning round. All right, Brian, here you go. You ready?

Brian Birdy: Ready.

Pete Neubig: What property management software do you use?

Brian Birdy: I use Rentvine.

Pete Neubig: Rentvine. What is your current organizational structure? Pod.

Brian Birdy: I am departmentally structured, and I have three pillars that come off of that. So I have residential, I have vacation rental and I have association. And then the entire structure is departmentalized within each of those three pillars, they each run separate of each other, but all departmentalized.

Pete Neubig: Do you use virtual team members?

Brian Birdy: I do. I have 54 members who work for me, not counting anybody in the sales side of it and, uh, 28 of those, which is more than 50%, are remote team members. I have remote team members in Mexico. I have now in Canada because one of my Mexico couples moved to Canada, and I have one remote team member who actually is in Waco, Texas, because she worked here and had to move home and did not want to change her job. And I usually say she can't do that, but I challenged her to perform better than she ever has, and she's killing it even though she's not in our office.

Pete Neubig: Amazing. Do you have BDMs, salespeople?

Brian Birdy: We do. I have a director of business development, and she has remote team members that support her in that process.

Pete Neubig: What is one piece of advice you'd give someone just starting out in the property management business?

Brian Birdy: Really be smart about the people that you hire for both owners and staff. I've gone through... I made so many mistakes with hiring bad owners and doing business with people I never should have, and I kind of knew it in the first place and this philosophy of, hire slowly and fire quickly was something it took me a long term to learn. But once I really focused on really hiring, not out of just immediate necessity and then putting up with people because they were there and it would be so hard to train somebody else. And I'm going to make them better. I'm going to show them how to survive. You just really have to learn about the people you work with, both employees and owners, investors that you work with, both. That's you got to learn how to be good at hiring people.

Pete Neubig: I want to expand on that just a second. If you're starting out, and revenue is a challenge, would you still take on a bad owner for the revenue?

Brian Birdy: I tell people all the time, I said, hey, understand that you're doing it and it and that you shouldn't do it and fire them as soon as possible. But if you're hungry and you need it, and you look at and go, he's willing to pay me, I gotta take it. Now remember, this was my screening when they when I first started, they called and said, do you do property management? I said, yes, and I said, do you have a home you need to rent? And they said, yes. I said, great, I'll send you a contract. That was it. That was my entire, you know, they were breathing and they would sign my contract. I took their house. I took a house. It was a duplex. Once I showed up to the duplex, the other half of the duplex was gone. It had burnt to the ground and the inside wall had not. It had. No one had done anything. So it was basically exposed to his property. I mean, I made a lot of bad mistakes at the beginning, but and I warn people, it is hard to say no when you're starving and you're hungry, but try to go focus because it will eat up and slow down your growth. It's hard to do, I know that.

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Brian Birdy: You still have to warn him. You still gotta tell them.

Pete Neubig: Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Brian Birdy: Anything belongs on pizza. If you like it, eat it.

Pete Neubig: What's your favorite fast food restaurant?

Brian Birdy: Oh, I'd have to say Cane's. Cane's chicken right now. I love Cane's.

Pete Neubig: Cane's Chicken.

Brian Birdy: Cane's Chicken Fingers is a good place.

Pete Neubig: What was your first job?

Brian Birdy: My very first job. I well, my very, very, very first paying job. I delivered the Express News newspaper, which was the afternoon delivered newspaper in San Antonio when they had two of them. So I would get home from school on the bus and get on my bicycle to deliver them. But the true first real job I went to work at dairy Queen. Probably one of the reasons why everyone knows I love ice cream so much because they hired me at 15 years old and they could hire me at 15. It's so funny here. I took my paper route money and I bought a moped and my mom wouldn't let me drive down the main street. So I showed her I had a pathway through the neighborhoods to drive from my house to Dairy Queen.

Pete Neubig: To Dairy Queen.

Brian Birdy: At 15 I rode my moped and went to work at 15 years old, working at dairy Queen. And I loved working in that little ice cream shop.

Pete Neubig: I bet you did. What is your ideal vacation?

Brian Birdy: My ideal vacation is one where I get to be around some friends. Eat some ice cream, have a drink and play some games. I don't really care where it's at.

Pete Neubig: Love it. What is something that most people don't know about you?

Brian Birdy: Um, I have, uh. Oh. What they don't know about... What they don't know about me. Well, I've run 22 marathons in my life, and most people probably don't know about that. I've never had a marathon shape. I never looked like a runner. But I just get out there and just keep moving. Now, I had signed up to be a triathlete and I'm still working on it, but have not made even the half ironman distance yet. It's getting harder. As old as I am. I keep getting other things in front of me that slowing me down.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, well, I think it went the other way with pickleball.

Brian Birdy: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: What book are you currently reading or watch one that's impacted your business or life?

Brian Birdy: Um, um, what's the one? I just. Hold on a minute. I should know these things off the top of my head. So I read so many. Here's one I read. It's very different. You probably would never would come up to this is going to be the one that came out here. But I really enjoyed this one and I kind of learned a little bit from it. Um, it's called The Rising by Larry Silverstein. It is about the real estate investor who ultimately owned. He closed on the lease on the World Trade Center about 90 days before they went to the ground.

Pete Neubig: Wow.

Brian Birdy: And then the next 20 years of trying to survive that process and build out, it was a very interesting story because basically, he signed a lease on that property and became the master leaser of all of that. It was going to be going to be his dream. He was going to make all kinds of money and be right around. I mean, what a great place to be in charge of and managing all of that real estate. And within 90 days, neither of the buildings existed anymore.

Pete Neubig: Wow. Ouch.

Brian Birdy: Yep. It's called The Rising by Larry Silverstein.

Pete Neubig: The Rising. Which Disney character do you most associate with?

Brian Birdy: Um, goofy! I'm a little goofy. I like goofy. Goofy always has a smile on his face. He doesn't take things too seriously. He knows how to have fun.

Pete Neubig: I love it. What is one challenge you're currently facing in your business?

Brian Birdy: Uh, well, currently, probably the greatest challenge we're having right now is is very clear is that vacancy rates are up. The amount of time it takes. I think we're attacking it very smart, but it is still a challenge. This has been an interesting year. I dug into the statistics. You know, the the lowest vacancy rate in America in the last 25 years was in the second quarter of 2022, and we have dramatically raised from that. Now we're at 6.9% nationwide. That was at 5.4%. That was the lowest that it had been in 25 years. The highest it was was back in 2008 when it was 11.1%. And I realized I was in management then. I was renting houses then. But I remember back then I told people it would take me 60, 90 days to rent your house. And they just accepted it. I grew my business around then, so I'm just trying to figure out a way to attack this. We got really spoiled the last five years that if you put a house in the market, you got it rented in no time flat.

Pete Neubig: You need to do a full make ready? Just just...

Brian Birdy: Oh, yeah. Just put it up, they'd take it in. It's in perfect position just to get into it. And we're in a completely different world now. So we're just double checking and making sure everything is running the way it needs to minimize that number. Because we're at the greatest risk of losing an owner when it's vacant.

Pete Neubig: That's right.

Brian Birdy: So I don't want vacancy to be long, because that causes me the chances of losing business.

Pete Neubig: And you have to set realistic expectations now.

Brian Birdy: Absolutely. Big time. All the time. Continually.

Pete Neubig: What do you prefer dogs or cats?

Brian Birdy: Dogs.

Pete Neubig: Dog guy. Brian, you're off the lightning round. Congratulations. If somebody wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way to contact you?

Brian Birdy: Uh, just send me an email. I check my email. It's brian@birdy com. B-R-I-A-N @ B-I-R-D-Y.com. Hey, one of the greatest things my dad, who was not very technically minded, in 1996 he bought birdy.com as a website before websites were even what they are today.

Pete Neubig: And look at that. And he was still doing stuff on three ring binder.

Brian Birdy: Five letter URL. That's right in the business name. Pretty cool right? His first website was a digital business card. You went to the page. The page did nothing. You clicked on nothing. All it was was the information you would find on a business card. And it's funny what it's led to today and how important that is, but having a five letter Significant URL is pretty cool.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I'm sure it helps with with your Google ranking as well.

Brian Birdy: Oh it does, it does. It's been around so long. It's a big powerhouse having the history behind it.

Pete Neubig: Absolutely. If you're listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, please give us a call at (800) 782-3452, or go to narpm.org. And sign up today and become a member. And, you know, get all the learnings and training and go to the conferences and, and get plugged in and you will supercharge your business. And if you want to be cool, like Brian and have a bunch of virtual team members, give us a call at vpmsolutions.com, or email me directly. Like Brian, I don't have an executive assistant reach through my email. It's pete@vpmsolutions.com. Brian, thanks so much for being here. We'll see you everybody.