A Podcast | Lindsay Liu

Pete Neubig: [00:00:32] Welcome back, everybody. And, uh, as promised, I have Lindsay Liu here who is newer to our industry. She was at broker owner. We had met at broker owner right before. Broker owner, actually, she reached out and we connected. And I love her. I love the concept of her product. I can't say I've used it, but, um, she's she's big into AI. Uh, Super is big into AI. And I know that is a buzzword, not just in our industry, but but everywhere. So. Lindsay. Thanks so much for joining us on the NARPM podcast today.

Lindsay Liu: [00:01:05] Thanks for having me today.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:07] So all right, two quick questions that come to my mind right away. First is what exactly is Super. What challenges does it solve. And then how did you get into the whole AI thing? Like like what kind of what was your background and how did you develop that company and create that company? So I'll just let you take it from there.

Lindsay Liu: [00:01:24] All right. Absolutely. So, uh, at Super, what we are building is what we call the AI assistant for property management. And what I think of that is, is the intersection of team efficiency and five star resident experience. Right. So how do we have these two components of empowering your team to be as effective and efficient and productive as possible, alongside a better and more responsive resident experience? So that's really all that we think about. We do that through an AI powered platform that is able to synchronize every communication. I think that anyone that's in the property management space knows that is the heartbeat of the industry is communication with all of your different stakeholders, whether that's an owner, a tenant, a vendor, someone else within your team that day. And then we're able to automate a bunch of things by having all of those communications, whether that's email, text message, a phone call, a work order from another platform, all of those coming into one place, and we can do a whole bunch of really cool things on top of that.

Pete Neubig: [00:02:28] So kind of give me a little, a little behind the scenes of how it works. Is it does it sit on top of the PM software or do I not need PM software anymore? Like what? Like it sounds like I still need PM software. So just kind of like. All right, so somebody emails me or somebody creates a ticket inside my software. Take me through just kind of what that looks like.

Lindsay Liu: [00:02:47] Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing to say is that, you know, the PMS systems are very, very solid accounting basis for folks, right? I think they are like the core of your back office operations. What's happened over time is a lot of them have bolted on some of the front office needs that have been needed, right? Work order, maintenance requests, um, leasing inquiries and all of that. But their bread and butter is accounting. And so what we've really identified as a opportunity in this space is to build a communication stack that is only excellent at thinking about all of the different needs from a communication perspective. And the reality is what we found is that, like, you know, as great of a portal as you can have, it is still a portal. And I'm sure you know, you run into this every day with, with your service. Right? Which is that at the end of the day, if somebody's got your email address, if they've got your phone number, that is going to be their preferred way to tell you about something that is going to be their preferred way to reach out to you. And so you're never going to go away from having an email inbox that needs attention. It's never you know, you're never going to get rid of the phone. And so what we said was instead of battling that and trying to get everyone to shift their behaviors and figure out how to learn something new, how do we work alongside those things? And so we work alongside the property management system. We can sit on top of that to be able to take in any of those notifications and work order requests that come in. We work alongside your email, as well as phone and text message to enable communication across all of those platforms.

Pete Neubig: [00:04:23] So let's use this as an example. So let's say a resident makes a phone call. Is that so they call and they let's just say they're calling because they see a charge on their, on their, on their ledger that they have a question about. So if they call the old way is I have to answer the call. If not, they're going to leave a voicemail. And somebody may or may, may or may not get back to them within 24 hours. Right. Everybody says 24 hours, and usually it's about 4 or 5 days later. So now take me through. How does the how how would the tech make that interaction for the resident better? Right? Because at the end of the day, that's that's what we're trying to do, right? Because we try to make we're trying to give better customer service. Right?

Lindsay Liu: [00:05:08] Yep. Absolutely. So what would happen if, if, uh, they were using Super is if they called, uh, we would be able to take that message. We would be able to create a task from it. So we'd automatically go to work order creation for it. We would include in that task a transcription of the phone call. So if you don't have time to listen to it, it's there in writing and also a recording of it if you ever need it. Now what we do is we listen to the content of that message and we apply the AI intelligence on top of that. So let's say they had, um, you said they had a question about their accounting statement, right? So we would be able to see that that's an accounting related inquiry and would immediately then assign it to the accounting point person. So all of that routing of who.

Pete Neubig: [00:05:57] That's something that we. Is that something that we kind of set up? Like if it says accounting then it goes to Barbara and accounting.

Lindsay Liu: [00:06:02] Exactly. Okay. Yep. So you can set up and customize a bunch of these rules. We give folks rules out of the box. So it's like, you know you're not starting with a blank slate. We kind of know, you know, a few things that you might want to have, but then you can go and you can customize all of that, right? You can say, who should it go to? A good example that I give is if there is curse words in a message, right. This is clearly a disgruntled person. How do you make sure that that gets attention in the right way? Right. So some teams might say, um, if I notice that there are swear words in a communication, then it should go to the it should go to the head of that department. Right. So that they can deal with it.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:38] It gets escalated automatically.

Lindsay Liu: [00:06:40] Yeah, exactly. Or it could be maybe I just want to cc the the owner so that they know what's going on. And at least they're in the loop on it with without having to find out days later that this whole incident happened. So there's a lot of different, really interesting workflows that we can customize there that make sure the right people are brought in faster, and that we're contextualizing it to the content of the message.

Pete Neubig: [00:07:03] Now can it? Now in this case, I'm leaving a voicemail. Can it actually respond to that, to that resident and say, hey, because we looked we have your email on file or an auto responder phone call or text message that then says, hey, we saw that, we received this, we saw this. And then here, like, here's your your here's the answer, so to speak. Like is can it do that automatically? Like can it actually answer some of these questions.

Lindsay Liu: [00:07:30] It's funny, Pete because it feels like you said you haven't used it, but it sounds like you have these questions. So exactly. So what it can do is so let's say they call, they leave a message. The first thing that we'll do is we're able to identify who that contact is. And if we also know if they're calling from a mobile phone or a landline as well So if they're on a mobile phone, we'll kick off a text thread with them. We can confirm that we got that message, and we can also include a saved response for that. So for instance, it's an accounting question. You might say every single time someone has an accounting question it's usually about how do I check my balance. Right. So your response could be a template that says, thank you for reaching out to us about your accounting question. Have you looked on your portal to check your balance yet? Here's the link to go do that so we can text message that back. If they're calling us from a landline, we'll send them an email to their email address on file with that. So we're just trying to kind of create those feedback loops for folks and just give them the right kind of direction as quickly as possible. There.

Pete Neubig: [00:08:33] Now when it when it sends it to Barbara in accounting, does it create an email for Barbara or is it is it a ticket like is it is Super kind of a ticketing system because that's I'm a big fan of ticketing systems because you can track things, right? I can't track emails. So how does that work?

Lindsay Liu: [00:08:51] Yeah, I mean, so Barbara has options. It will always go in as a task. So that ticket will always get created. It'll have a timestamp. It'll show who created it. Right. The context of all of it. Um, so that will always be there. And just to your point, you know, having task management software is amazing because you can make it actionable as well. I feel like email is not actionable. It's either read or unread. Right? Um, well.

Pete Neubig: [00:09:13] I'll give you I'll give you a really a really quick story. Um, when I had my, my PM firm, Empire, I had a, I had a lawsuit hitting against me for mold in a property. And, uh, we actually did everything right, but I couldn't find the damn email because my property manager had left and her email was buried. And so we actually had to we actually had to use our, um, our insurance and our insurance, you know, basically wrote him a check instead of actually fighting this thing. If it was a ticket and I had ticketing system, it would have been much more simpler for me to find all that communication. So that's why I'm a I'm a big fan because I literally got bit in the butt with it.

Lindsay Liu: [00:09:53] Oh, man, I'm sorry to hear that. That's the exact kind of example, right? I think that's such a good, uh, such a good use case for what technology can solve right here. And I think the thing is that the interaction that I just mentioned, I'm not necessarily saying we should be eliminating the human experience and saying that Barbara probably didn't need to answer that very first question. And if that person couldn't get to the answer they needed on their own, now Barbara can step in and she has more time to provide them with a better level of service. Right on that. And so Barbara can also choose, do I want to be notified via email for everything that comes in? And then what's really cool is our system is completely compatible there. So she can respond via email if she wants to. We're still and it.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:37] All goes into it, tracks into the system.

Lindsay Liu: [00:10:40] So whether it's a phone call or text message or an email, it all gets tracked in one thread for that ticket. So if you ever needed to go back and look at the paper trail. For that you would see Barbara's messages and emails back.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:52] Now, do you, as the PM firm, do I have to build my knowledge base out like right? So over time you're building out your knowledge base and then so it knows what to send. Like in this case it was sending the the resident here. Have you checked your balance. We have to put that in input somewhere I'm assuming like how do you check your balance type type stuff and then do you just build a database and then the AI is smart enough to know what what answers to what questions? Or do I got to, like map everything out?

Lindsay Liu: [00:11:19] You know, this is I think this is like just we're just at the precipice of what's possible with AI right now. And so it's a really exciting and fun time to be building in it. So, you know, right now, we definitely want to work with every single customer to train the AI for their specific needs. And I think that's the other thing is every company, every property, every team is different in their preferences. So we want to give people as much control over that as possible, especially when you're talking about AI starting to respond on your behalf. I think you want to feel right now.

Pete Neubig: [00:11:49] Because that's nervous, right? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Lindsay Liu: [00:11:52] Exactly. So that's something that we work. You know, we have a really what we call our fast and free, um, onboarding process. And during that period, our team will work with you to kind of say, hey, send us your SOPs, send us examples of common responses that you create. We can set up some of those early templates, and then you can go and figure out if you want to adjust them in any way, if you want to change them and add more.

Pete Neubig: [00:12:13] And if somebody has this built in like, like notion or some other software, like we use knowledge base articles in like HubSpot, would you, would you be able to would Super be able to connect to that, or do you actually have to extract it out and put it into Super?

Lindsay Liu: [00:12:26] For now, we'll be extracting it. I think that's kind of just again, because everyone's got it in different formats, in different places. I think that the thing, you know, as we talk about the capabilities of AI, one of the things that is a real strength with the technology right now is it's able to take unstructured data and make it structured. That's like, I think at the crux of it, what's so great, it's why it's able to take conversational, right? And turn that into an action. Um, on top of that. And so absolutely, that's something that we do want to build out very soon, is the ability for you to just link your knowledge base. We're training off of it. And then it's it's off to the races from there.

Pete Neubig: [00:13:00] And is there reporting capabilities. So for example, I can see how many tickets Barbara has, how many. She's closed her average time to respond. Average time to close I can I can I see stats like that so I can know if. Is Barbara overworked? Do I need two Barbaras? Do I need to hire a Barbara, an assistant? Like is there information like that that's available in Super?

Lindsay Liu: [00:13:22] Yeah, I love that we think about that a lot because, you know, teams are really overwhelmed these days. And I think understanding how to best support your team members. Right? Where do they need help. Like you were saying. Um, where can someone else maybe they're a little lighter and they can step in. How do we kind of do more of that load balancing? Um, for folks. So we have a couple different ways that we do reporting one is more of a real time dashboard, right? You can go in, you can take a look across your entire portfolio. You can look across the properties, across the personnel as well. And you can see what are they working on, how many things are due soon, how many things are overdue, what categories are they in? Right? So for instance, if someone's got a lot of compliance activities, that's probably something that's going to take them a little bit more time than a standard work order. So understanding the nuances for supporting team members there. And then we do automated reporting as well. And some folks have chosen to opt their owners into that as well. So the owners are getting transparency into how many workers have you processed.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:21] I personally hate that idea, but I get it.

Lindsay Liu: [00:14:24] That's why I said some people have chosen to opt into that, and it's going to be very specific to you might have, you know, three owners that you're like, oh my God, I know they're going to call me three times this month.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:36] That's nice you can do a base by owner versus versus. You can blank it.

Lindsay Liu: [00:14:39] It's not across the portfolio. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:41] And then um can I add like thresholds or metrics. So I can look at KPIs. So if Barbara has a KPI of responding within a day is like is there something I could put in say if she responds after, you know, after a day it turns red or, or is that next iteration?

Lindsay Liu: [00:14:58] That is all coming soon. I think some of the really powerful stuff that we can start to do is identify patterns. We can identify, uh, failure points as well. Right. So, for instance, if your SOP is that every maintenance request needs to be responded to within 24 hours, it doesn't need to be closed, but responded to and you've got three maintenance tickets that have come in that have not yet been responded. We are going to we're building out the capabilities to be able to escalate those things to you and then to figure out kind of how to get those things done from there. So I think the idea of almost setting like metrics at the organization level and then us not even making you have to go and pull a report for it, but holding you accountable for it and kind of saying, hey, this is the SOP you said this was not met is really, really powerful. So that's all coming soon. And there's a whole lot of other really interesting, um, opportunities to, to use AI to, to make the analysis of the data even more seamless as well. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:15:59] Like you said, you're you're just scratching the surface.

Lindsay Liu: [00:16:02] Totally.

Pete Neubig: [00:16:02] So you are um, on the tech side of things, right? Like you're not you you don't have any property management experience. You weren't a property manager. You're a young person. So I know that you weren't a property manager in a future life here. So tell me how. And I know you have a partner. So tell me how you guys came together. How you decided. Hey, we want to build AI for this industry for especially. I guess you guys are more SFR than multifamily, but I guess you can do both. But. But like, how do you decide this is the industry I want to get in and we're going to we're going to use AI in this industry.

Lindsay Liu: [00:16:35] Yeah. So I actually do have a little bit of experience, um, managing my own portfolio. So that's kind of how I got exposure to this space as I invest in real estate. And I've always been very, very bullish on the asset class. Um, obviously as somebody that funds their own company, you like having control and I feel like it's an asset class where you have the most control over your investment, right? Compared to just throwing it in the stock market. So I've always been very bullish on it that way. Um, I started doing rehabs like fix and flips in HOA units, ended up on the board of three HOAs as a result of that. That's a whole story for another time.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:12] Okay. That's one. That's one over beers.

Lindsay Liu: [00:17:15] Then I'll never touch those investments ever again. Um, uh, have a couple single family, um, uh, investment, uh, properties, couple syndicates through that as well, and then a few multifamily, um, as well. So I've kind of worked across the different spectrum. Um, personally. Right. With a very small, um, unit count, um, on my own portfolio, and it really opened my eyes to the opportunities for technology in the space. And I think coming from a technology background, my co-founder as well, she worked in in big tech companies for many years as well, coming from, uh, environments where, uh, you know, innovating from a technology perspective is kind of always seen as the culture. When I was interfacing in this, you know, previously, my side hustle on the real estate side, I was like, there is such a big gap here to be filled, right? There's just a lot of things that and I understand why it happens. It's such a physical asset class. Right. It's very possible to continue to manage a property through pen and paper if you wanted to. Today, it's going to make your life more difficult, but you can do it right? Um, whereas for a lot of other parts of the industry, sorry, you don't have an online bank account, you don't have an email, you don't allow texting, your business doesn't work. And so what we thought was a great opportunity was to be able to bring together our background and kind of thinking about really simple user experiences, ways to bring technology to large groups of people. My co-founder had spent some time at one of the big tech companies at meta and building for billions of users. Right. So like across the world, how do you make something so simple that anyone can access it? And and bringing that specifically to this space that just felt like it was so ripe for, um, some additional innovation.

Pete Neubig: [00:19:05] All right. So, um, AI obviously is a super hot topic everywhere, especially in, in property management. So, um, as the AI expert like that, you and I are the expert now because you're on the podcast, so you're you're the expert. What are some do's and some don'ts for property for property managers? Um, what are some maybe opportunities as well as what maybe we should be cautious of? So I know that's a huge loaded question, but, you know, just, uh, whatever you got on there. On there. I know I'm throwing you a curveball. I'm throwing you a slider on oh, two slider here, but, uh, let's let's see what you got. All right.

Lindsay Liu: [00:19:42] We'll try to to not take another hour. Um, on this, I would say the dos would be, you know, this is a technology that is going to be in our lives in a very big way in the very near future.

Pete Neubig: [00:20:01] So do embrace it. That's the first thing is you have to embrace it, huh?

Lindsay Liu: [00:20:04] I think it's just it's one of those moments where, um, you know, you have to actually think about how do I out-innovate myself because otherwise someone else is going to come and do it. And the one thing I will say is just, you know, as we're building in this space, the speed at which this is continuing to adapt and evolve is so much faster than most other technologies that or any other technologies that have come before. So the pace of change is going to be very, very rapid. And so I would just say, you know, lean into it, realize that this is the new normal that we are living in, and it's not something to necessarily be afraid of. There's so many opportunities that it can unlock for you. I think it's finding the right opportunities. Right? Don't go on a I guess from a donor's perspective, don't go on a wild goose chase on the next shiny thing. Really think about the opportunities where it fits within your business, right? It's not just an add on, bolt on thing, but it's solving existing core business problem that you have and find a way that you can use AI to automate that component.

Pete Neubig: [00:21:09] Let me pause you there, because, you know, most property management owners in the SFR space are basically you're looking you're looking at the avatar. He's in his 50s. Um, and it's typically male dominated in their 50s. So if you're listening to this and this AI thing is going over your head or you're getting nervous just hearing about AI, listen to Lindsay, we have to embrace it. That doesn't mean that you have to learn it and you have to know it. You can hire that out whether it's through, you know, uh, you know, a, a contractor or through hiring, you know, your hell, your kid's friends or whatever, right? The these kids growing up today, they're they're growing up with AI like we grew up. Uh, well, I didn't grow up with the internet, but I grew up with Atari. Right. And and but the but the millennials grew up with the internet, right? They don't know a world without internet. Us guys with Gen Z or whatever the heck we are. Um, we knew a time before the internet, and so you have to embrace the technology, because if you're not evolving, you're dying. If you're not growing, you're dying all that good stuff. So do not let fear take you away from building, uh, you know, the tech and using the the tool, because that's all AI is, is just a tool. Um, so I just wanted to put that out there as a PSA announcement for our listeners, Lindsay. So, uh, so what are some of that? What are some things they should be cautious of?

Lindsay Liu: [00:22:33] I think some of the things to be cautious of will be I mentioned, you know, the shiny thing syndrome, right? Don't get caught spending a lot of time on something that's not necessarily solving a core business problem, because that's definitely going to sour your opinion on the technology, right? So kind of, you know, really go back to, I would say, kind of number one thing is, um, demos might be slick, it might look really cool. Take a step back and understand what is this supposed to solve and what is the goal here, and can that solve that right. So Super might be a great, uh, product for you if you are looking to save your team time, if that's not your number one priority and it's something else, then look for an AI tool that's going to solve that problem, right? Um, the second thing I would say is that we are also in an age of, uh, data security that is evolving very, very quickly. And so I would really caution Anyone that has team members, for instance, using out of the box free ChatGPT. So if you just go to ChatGPT. Com and have your team doing work on there in order to help them write things and respond to things, that data is being used to train their models. It's not proprietary to you anymore. And so there's a lot of, I think, things to be, um, you know, a little, uh, cautious of as far as the data that you are providing and the provider and what they're looking to get out of that. And I would say for the most part, anyone that's using those models, as long as they're using the paid version of it, you have more control over that. And then I think the thing is, any of your software providers that are leveraging that as well, just get an understanding of of how seriously they take your data security, right. Because now you're talking about more and more data ending up in a system, and your customer data is their home addresses, right? Their sense of information. That's the kind of thing that you want to be thoughtful of for protecting yourself.

Pete Neubig: [00:24:38] What would you say to somebody that's like, man, I really don't want to embrace AI because I like my team and I don't want my I don't want to have to cut jobs. Like, there's this fear that AI is going to take over the world and everybody's going to be without a job, and we're all going to be bums. What, like, I'm sure we can leverage AI so I don't have to hire as many people. But if I bring AI into my company, am I getting rid of people? Like what? And be honest. Like, is that is that a concern that people should have?

Lindsay Liu: [00:25:10] I think it's going to change how we think about what people do at work. And I think that's a really healthy push, right? If you have somebody today whose sole job is to do something incredibly repetitive and not utilize their brain in their full capacity, that's probably not the best use of a person, right? And I think about this a lot, which is I do not believe that technology is ever going to remove the human aspect of things. It can't.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:39] Especially in this industry. Right. Especially in this industry.

Lindsay Liu: [00:25:41] That's exactly like that's the crux of it, right? It's problem solving. It's good communication. It's um, you know, being accountable. Right. I think that technology can help with some of these things, right? It can really be a Supercharger for you on the accountability side, reminding you when things need to get done or if they haven't been addressed yet. On faster communication and responses to residents, and taking a lot of that work off of your team's plate. And so I would think of this more as, does this enable you to have a workforce that A has more like like more balance, right. Most property managers I talk to, their phones are ringing off the hook.

Pete Neubig: [00:26:17] Twenty-four seven.

Lindsay Liu: [00:26:18] Weekends.

Pete Neubig: [00:26:19] Yep.

Lindsay Liu: [00:26:19] On vacation they can't, right? And so it's it's a hard job. It's one that leads to a lot of burnout and turnover there. So think of this as as something that is almost like a benefit to your team, right? In kind of making their jobs better. I think the other part of it is it allows you to think about hiring for, um, a team that a you can keep a leaner team, right. So this idea of can I manage more doors with the same headcount? I think absolutely, yes. The answer is yes if you are using the right technologies. Um, the second component of that is who am I hiring? Am I hiring folks that are just more of the critical thinking, strategic thinkers partners to my customers, right? The type of, um, type of team member that an owner is going to want to go and have a real conversation.

Pete Neubig: [00:27:04] Am I hiring taskers or am I? Am I hiring Taskers or am I hiring asset managers?

Lindsay Liu: [00:27:08] Exactly. Exactly, right? And so now they're the experts in what they do. And that's a really interesting flip for a business owner, um, to be able to have, because now you are also you have more people that are empowered to have that conversation, and it's creating more time for you to be able to go and grow the business and do these other important things as well. So there's really, really interesting ways, I think to think about it, if you start to step back from the fear based approach and think about what is it fundamentally that it is enabling, and how do I apply that into the challenges my business is facing?

Pete Neubig: [00:27:40] All right. So you're a tech guru. There has been more tech coming into our industry over the last ten years than than over the last five, I would say, than in the last 25 years before that. Um, and the tech is getting it's getting, um, expensive, right? X dollars per unit and then this and then that. And then I got the, you know, the AppFolio. But now I got Super on top of that. And I have Meld and, you know, it just becomes, you know, just more and more money. So how how can somebody measure their return on investment of a tech stack.

Lindsay Liu: [00:28:15] Yeah. Great question. I think that again, it comes back to the problem that it's solving. Right. And again, every business is going to be different on the KPIs and kind of how they're thinking about what's good for their business. But I think there's there's top line and there's bottom line ways to think about it, right? Bottom line is where is this helping me cut costs? So is this, you know, that I can think about my team structure in a different way. Is this that I can think about not having delaying hiring somebody because I'm able to take on more workload with the same team today. Right. What are some of those things that it can replace as well? I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunities for the bottom line, I think where it gets very, very interesting and this is where it's unique to that business is the top line opportunities. What does this enable you as a small business owner, to be able to now have eight more hours a week to be able to go and close the business? What does that enable you to do by having your leadership team and your directors now have more time to be able to make sure that they're retaining properties, right? These are the types of opportunities, I think, that again, depending on kind of the core business challenges you're having, whether that's a retention problem or a growth problem or a in retention could be clients as well as team members, right? Hiring is really expensive and hard to do as well. And training a new person has a lot of overhead that's required with that as well. So I think, you know, getting back to that and then be thoughtful about measuring that. And then if you're bringing on a software partner, like we want to understand what are the challenges that you're dealing with, and then how do we make sure that we're delivering on that together. Right. So we can actually measure the outcome of what we're doing as well. And that's that's a really important thing to just make sure you have that partnership.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:03] Lindsay, I could talk to you all day about AI and property management, but we're up against it. We're going to hit a commercial break, and then we're going to put you through the lightning round. We'll be right back, everybody.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:27] Welcome back everybody. All right, Lindsay, we put you on the hot seat. The lightning round. All right, here we go. Are you ready?

Lindsay Liu: [00:30:34] I think so. I don't know. Only one way to know.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:37] I'm gonna ask you. I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions. Think about the first thing that comes to your mind. You can answer it if you want to expand on it. Great. But you don't have to. All right. All right, so what is one mistake you've made in business?

Lindsay Liu: [00:30:50] Comes back to hiring. Who do you hire? Who's on your team? The right capabilities.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:57] What, um. What is one piece of advice you'd give? You would give someone just starting out in the PM industry.

Lindsay Liu: [00:31:06] Be thoughtful about your stack because they are hard to switch from. At least that's what we've heard. So really think about where you want to scale and where you want that to grow with you.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:18] Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Lindsay Liu: [00:31:21] Absolutely. Big fan of Hawaiian.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:25] Yeah, we were friends. Uh, what was your first job?

Lindsay Liu: [00:31:29] Uh, I worked at a coffee shop. I slung lattes, and to this day, I am still very proud of the beautiful lattes I make.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:38] What is your ideal vacation?

Lindsay Liu: [00:31:43] I would like to say that I'm a beach vacation person, but the reality is, probably can't sit that still for too long. So combination of, like, beach and mountains. That's why Hawaii is so great. Which is why I love a Hawaiian pizza.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:57] There you go. Beach then mountains, then Hawaiian pizza.

Lindsay Liu: [00:32:01] All the above. Perfect vacation.

Pete Neubig: [00:32:03] What is a book that you are currently reading or one that's impacted your business or life that you could recommend?

Lindsay Liu: [00:32:10] Um. Hold on, I have to look up the title of this book, so I, uh, I recently was recommended to read the the book by the guy that runs the EOS methodology, which I know a lot of property managers.

Pete Neubig: [00:32:29] Gino Wickman?

Lindsay Liu: [00:32:30] Yes. Um, teams use. And that was a really, really it's called Traction. Now I've got it. Um, so Traction was a really interesting read for me because as somebody from the tech space, it is, you know, we think of entrepreneurship as venture backed startups or bootstrapped startups

Pete Neubig: [00:32:49] A little bit different.

Lindsay Liu: [00:32:49] And it's very it's very, very different. Getting the perspective of truly bootstrapped small business owners and entrepreneurs and how they need to think about their businesses and growth. And I think it's given me a lot of great tips for my own business, but also a really great understanding of how to connect with other entrepreneurs in the space.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:08] If you like Traction, I recommend reading Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. Traction was literally built on scaling up like he took Scaling Up and Traction from it.

Lindsay Liu: [00:33:17] The sequel not.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:19] Really. I mean, he pilfered it. He. I don't want to say he stole it. He just borrowed the idea and and made it his own. All right. What is one challenge you're currently facing in your business?

Lindsay Liu: [00:33:34] You know, I'll say you property managers are tough to sell, tough to tough to kind of convince why change is necessary. But I think what a great time also for our businesses overall. Right. To be in this industry at this moment, as we are um, at the precipice, I think of some really, really big changes. And I think, again, just getting over that fear mindset and embracing the new and just kind of jumping in to it. You know, that's kind of where the really fun stuff happens.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:04] Yeah. You know, with this clientele again, older, older folks, you're going to have to do some training and some education on AI before you can sell them. And so it's going to take a little bit longer sales process on that for sure. Um, and it's still kind of new to our industry, and I know he has been around for quite a, you know, for a few years, but in this industry it's really a lot newer. So, um, it's kind of come around for sure. For sure.

Lindsay Liu: [00:34:35] I know we're getting there. I can feel it.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:37] Yeah. All right. Cats or dogs?

Lindsay Liu: [00:34:40] Uh, really hard question. I have both, I rescue both.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:44] Oh, nice. All right. You're my friend again. I don't care if you eat Hawaiian pizza now.

Lindsay Liu: [00:34:48] I'm gonna need an out on that one. Too hard to. You know, my cat will be upset. Dogs will be upset.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:54] The cat would actually be upset. The dog won't know any better.

Lindsay Liu: [00:34:58] That's true. It'll be like I'm sitting. I'm being a good boy.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:00] Awesome. Well, listen, you're off the. You're off the lightning round. So congratulations on on getting through that. Lindsay. You've been a great sport. Thank you so much for joining. If somebody was interested in contacting you or learning more about Super, what's the best way to to find out more about Super Absolutely.

Lindsay Liu: [00:35:17] Our website is www.hire, H-I-R-E Super.com and my email is just Lindsay, lIndsay@hiresuper.com.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:30] And if you're listening to this and you are not a NARPM member, need to join. So join, go to narpm, N-A-R-P-M.org or give them a call at (800) 782-3452. And if you are looking for remote team members to run Super for you, this way you don't have to do it and they can manage those inboxes. Uh, give us a call or go go to our website at vpmsolutions.com. Or you can email me at pete@vpmsolutions.com. And we now just, uh, rolled out our new Gold Glove service where we can actually do all the recruiting for you for a fraction of the cost of what others are charging. So, Lindsay, thanks again for being here. Everybody else, we'll see you next time.