A Podcast | Stephen Fox

Pete Neubig: [00:00:07] Welcome back, everybody, to the NARPM Podcast. And as promised, I got Stephen Fox with Upkeep Media. And, uh, Steven, thank you so much for being here today, buddy.

Stephen Fox: [00:00:18] Pete, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:21] All right. So Upkeep Media is basically a media company that focuses primarily on single family property management, uh, property management companies. Is that correct?

Stephen Fox: [00:00:31] That's correct. Exactly. So we focus primarily on helping single family residential property management companies bring on more properties to manage. So helping them get found by investors, by rental property owners that are looking to hire a property management company.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:46] So we're going to call this our marketing growth, uh, episode. We're going to grow, grow the, uh, how do you grow your business? How do you grow your PM business through marketing efforts? All right.

Stephen Fox: [00:00:55] That's all right. Hopefully I can provide some value.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:58] Well, you're making a living out of it, so I know you will provide some value. So when I hear marketing. Right. There's obviously different ways to market. There's the old way, the networking way. And then there's kind of the, the newer way, which is basically online marketing, which for, for your time and effort and dollar, it seems to be the, the way to go. And then as you dig into it, you hear about this SEO and, and this, this becomes like a, like a, like a magic word like that. No one really knows. So what exactly is SEO and what are some of the ways that you can improve your SEO as a company?

Stephen Fox: [00:01:37] Yeah. So I mean, SEO stands for search engine optimization. So what it is at its most basic level is getting your business found more on search engines. What a lot of people will think of when they think of SEO, at the most basic level is showing up for something like property management. Houston, let's say if you're based in Houston, what most property management companies don't realize, though, is the majority of searches online are not happening where someone is directly searching for a property management company. So yes, there are a lot of searches for something like Property Management Houston, but there's ten times more searches out there for rental property owners that are going out and searching for solutions to problems they're encountering with their rental property. So not only do you want to get your website and your business showing up for when someone's typing in property Management Houston, for example, if you're located in Houston, you also want to be showing up when someone's going online and typing out, I don't know, something like, should I rent my home or sell it?

Pete Neubig: [00:02:41] How do I how do I handle an eviction?

Stephen Fox: [00:02:43] Exactly. How do I deal with this troubled tenant? Those are actually like the type of queries that are not only going to be good at bringing in traffic, they're also going to be good at actually getting them to convert. Because what happens is someone that's encountering a problem when they go online and they search up for a solution, and your company is actually able to guide them with that problem, it's going to make them trust you more. So if someone is going online trying to figure out how do I handle an eviction, they find, you know, Pete Neubig property management, for example, and they see that Pete Neubig Property Management provides all this really great information that's helping them with managing their eviction. What do you think is going to happen? Right. They're going to be like, you know what? This Pete Neubig property management company is able to do this probably much better than I can. I'm having a terrible time dealing with a tenant because at this point I'm dealing with an eviction. It makes it much more likely for them to want to actually reach out to you than if you just show up for something like property management, Houston. Don't get me wrong, you want to show up for that as well, but there's a lot more to it than just showing up for like, property management in your city.

Pete Neubig: [00:03:56] This is like a hack in a way, right? Like it's going to my understanding. And I'll ask the expert here. You. It takes a long time to get to that front page of the search, especially Google. Right? Google's the owns the space basically. And it takes a long time and it takes a lot of content and and there's lots of different things that go into how Google will increase your SEO. Is that correct?

Stephen Fox: [00:04:23] Yeah. That's correct. So the amount of time will vary depending on the market, the competitiveness of that market. And basically like, um, how old your business is as well. Generally the older your business is, the more of a brand name it has in your market. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:04:39] And Google trusts it more.

Stephen Fox: [00:04:40] Right, exactly. But the truth is, anything in marketing these days takes time. It's not 2010 where you can put up an ad and you're one of three companies in your market that are running ads. Everyone, every property management company out there wants to get found. There is a very low barrier to entry industry. So if you want to actually stick around and get consistent leads using the internet, you need to have a longer term mindset, like the mindset of I'm going to make this work within the next three months. It's just not reality anymore. Um, the companies that are doing best are the ones that have a longer term mindset that know, okay, you know what? I'm going to invest now so that in three years, four years, five years to come, I'm going to be receiving dividends from all the work that I put in.

Pete Neubig: [00:05:28] Yeah. And that's that's really hard, right? Because you're you're investing money into marketing and knowing that you're not going to get a lot of return on investment for, you know, potentially a year. So do you see a lot of a lot of companies or a lot of clients make the mistake that they're spending a lot of time and effort to just get their name on that front page? In your example, Houston property management versus using what I'm calling a hack. But you know, basically creating content for those particular pain points like I do a content for like eviction Houston. Right. And and then have like and then and then second part of that question blog versus video. Both. Yes. No I saw lots of questions there.

Stephen Fox: [00:06:14] Yeah. So so first off, um, it's not that you don't want to show up for something like property management. Houston, don't get me wrong, that's going to bring in leads, but it's much more difficult. Every single company out there is going for that, where you can kind of pick up the lower hanging fruit quicker is by creating content geared towards particular keywords that are answering, uh, with solutions to problems that rental owners are encountering. Um, then.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:44] Right. So, basically the answer is both.

Stephen Fox: [00:06:47] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:47] But if you're only doing the one thing just to try to get your your URL up on property management. Houston, you're probably doing it wrong. You you need to do both is basically what you're saying. Exactly.

Stephen Fox: [00:07:00] And one is actually going to help the other. So the more traffic you can get to your website from other types of queries, the more Google will start to pay attention to your website. The more Google starts to pay attention to your website, the more likely they are to show it higher in search results for a keyword like Property management Houston. So it's basically like a spiral effect. You want to start with the lower hanging fruit, and that is what helps you eventually show up higher for those really competitive keywords.

Pete Neubig: [00:07:30] Okay, so if I'm going to do something that says eviction or some other pain point for property management, should I still throw in the keyword of Houston in there? If I'm Houston, like evictions in Houston?

Stephen Fox: [00:07:42] Yeah, you can throw in evictions in Houston, but you wouldn't want to optimize that page to show up or something like Property Management Houston, for example. That'll never happen. Google is smart enough to know, like we're not going to rank an article about the eviction process in Houston for a keyword like Property management Houston. So you would do that through an inner page being a blog post generally. Um, and to answer your second question of video versus written content, both or neither. How does that work? If you can do both, that's best. Um, so two things to think of there. One, if you are creating, uh, video content, not only can you put that up on your website, you can also use YouTube. YouTube is a search engine themselves, right? It's actually the second largest search engine in the world right now after Google. Google owns YouTube as well. The more that you can kind of feed into Google's ecosystem, the more Google favors your company. So by doing well on YouTube, it's going to benefit your website as well because what happens is people find you on YouTube, they go check out your website, more people that check out your website. The more Google sees people like this website, they're spending time on it so that they're they're going to help each other. Then what you should be doing with that video as well, not only putting it on YouTube, but embedding it on your website in that in a blog post and then creating a written article to go along with it as well. The reason why is now what you're going to have is you're going to be feeding Google and all ends. You're going to be giving them rich media on your website, which is a video, and then you're going to be giving them written content as well, which they can better understand by basically, their bots will be able to read through that content, and then you have to optimize that content to show up for different keywords as well. But basically, if you can do both video and written, it's going to help your website that much more.

Pete Neubig: [00:09:37] And if you do a video, you can get the video with AI tools. Now you get it transcribed pretty easily. So. Right. So like okay, so you say, okay, I create his blog. Where does this blog live? Does it live on your on your web? Like the video live lives on YouTube and then you embed it in your in your website. I understand that, okay, I write a blog on on my Google Doc word doc. Now how do I get that onto the internet? What do I like? What do I do?

Stephen Fox: [00:10:01] Then you would have a section on your website specific for different articles that you have created. And that's that's what we call a blog generally. And those articles are going to be directly on your website in that blog section.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:17] Got it. I sound like such a boomer, I know, I get it. All right. So so one way to help increase SEO is not just focusing on Houston property management and trying to do keywords and do blogs and posts just on that, just on Houston property management. But to actually focus on and this is this is worth the listen right here is to focus on pain points and create content to answer those pain points because it does two things. One is if somebody's actually not searching, Houston project management is searching evictions. Houston, you'll pop up and number two, you become the expert. That's correct. You're the one. That's right. And then and then feed everything into your website.

Stephen Fox: [00:11:03] Yeah. The more, the more topics you cover in depth, the more authority Google starts to pass on to your website because they're like, okay, they're covering everything that has to do with managing rental property.

Pete Neubig: [00:11:17] Got it. So this is where being if you are an SFR property management company focusing on SFR versus SFR, multifamily, short term HOA, this gets you this goes deeper and understanding your target so you can write specific stuff for that particular target. That would be helpful. Yeah?

Stephen Fox: [00:11:37] Yeah definitely.

Pete Neubig: [00:11:39] Excellent. Okay, so now I feed everything into my website. Um, the website itself, I've been taught. And I'll ask you if you agree. I've been taught that it's the website is actually not a marketing tool. The website is a conversion tool. And and so what do you what are your thoughts on that statement?

Stephen Fox: [00:11:58] Um, it is a marketing tool in the sense that it will get people to find you. Right? So if you create content and you show up in search engines, it's a marketing tool. Someone goes online, they're looking for help with an eviction. We're sticking to our previous example. They battle and they find your site that'll drive them to find your business. So in that sense, it's marketing. It's also equally important as a conversion tool though, because what's going to happen is you'll have two people that visit your site. You'll have people that found you online, and then you have people that found out about your business offline as well, people that found out about your business offline, but that know about your site will visit it. And what you want to do is make it very appealing for them to want to reach out to your business. So there's something that we kind of like to call the lemonade stand principle. And in property management, if you think of it from the point of view of an investor, and they're out there and they're trying to figure out which property management company do I want to go with? From their vantage point, they can't really differentiate one company versus another, right? They don't really know which company has the best standard operating procedure, which ones are going to actually do the best job at screening tenants, and so forth. All they really have to go off when they're doing research is your website and your online reputation. So from that standpoint, it's definitely a conversion tool. If you have a site that looks very generic or looks like every other property management company in your market, there's nothing that's really going to help your company differentiate itself from the competitor down the street. Whereas if your site stands out compared to all of your competitors, it's going to kind of give you a bit of a leg up, it is going to help invoke a little bit more trust in that person that is trying to decide between multiple companies. So from that standpoint, it's more of a conversion tool.

Pete Neubig: [00:13:50] Got it. Okay. I love it I think that's a great definition and analysis of it. All right. So I'm going to change gears a little bit I want to talk to you about numbers. Okay. I know we didn't talk about this in the green room. So I'm throwing I'm throwing him a curve ball everybody. But what are some like, you know, you can get really deep into the numbers and there's too many. And what I find is there's not enough people actually looking at the numbers. They don't know what to look at. So as a consulting firm, put your consulting hat on. And if I was coming to you and saying, hey, you know what? What should I look at? At least on a, on a weekly or monthly basis? And, and how do I know if what I'm doing is working?

Speaker3: [00:14:33] Yeah.

Stephen Fox: [00:14:33] So first thing you want to know before you do any type of marketing Is how much a client is worth to your business. That's the most important number you need to know before doing anything. If you don't know how much a client is worth to your business, you have absolutely no idea of knowing if you're getting a return on investment.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:52] All right. So that's called the LTV or lifetime value of the client.

Stephen Fox: [00:14:56] Yeah, exactly.

Pete Neubig: [00:14:57] How would you define lifetime value of a client for a property management firm. How would you come up with that number?

Stephen Fox: [00:15:02] Yeah. So generally what I recommend doing is take your your average monthly management fee, multiply it by the average length of time someone stays with your business. So let's say they stay for 60 months five years on average. Okay. Um, and your management fee is $100 per month.

Pete Neubig: [00:15:23] Okay.

Stephen Fox: [00:15:23] Then you're going to add on, uh, if you charge a leasing fee, add on that on as well. So let's say you charge first month's rent as your leasing fee. Then over the five year period, factor in how many times on average you need to charge that leasing fee. So let's say that you generally keep a tenant for about 2 to 3 years. We'll call it that. You're in a charge that leasing fee twice over a five year period then. Right. Um, so you'll add that on to your client lifetime value there as well. And then you're going to figure out any ancillary services that you offer as well. So what you want to do is basically add up all of the different fees that you charge for that client and then multiply it by your profit margin. So if your profit margin is 30% and you see that the total revenue you bring in from that client over a five year period is $10,000, you know, a client's worth around $3,000 to your business. Now, you know how much you can afford to spend to acquire a client. If you're able to go out and acquire a client for $500, you're bringing in six times the return, right? Using the example that I just spoke about. So that's kind of how you would go about figuring out what your client lifetime value is. Obviously we're doing this really quick just through audio, but, uh, that's that's usually how you would calculate your.

Pete Neubig: [00:16:43] I got it. Um, we did it just a tad different but basically very similar. Uh, instead of figuring out how many lease renewals, what we did is we just took the average over the year of. So we took here's our revenue from all the income that we got from all the properties divided by the number of properties divided by 12. And came up with a number is kind of how we did it.

Stephen Fox: [00:17:07] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:07] And it's, it's very it's similar to the way you're doing it is we're, it's a little bit harder to do, but it's actually more exact number. But this gives us an average. Right. So for example, if you, if you're making you know, but I did it by. So I learned something though from you. Um, what I learned, Stephen, is that I did it by top line revenue. And I like the way you did it better. So you say, here's your top line revenue. Let's just say my top line revenue is 2000 a year. They stayed for five years, $10,000. But I'm running a 20% profit margin.

Stephen Fox: [00:17:37] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:37] Well, that's worth $2,000 to me, so I love that. So if you're not doing the whole profit margin piece of it, I do recommend that you use Stephen's, um, uh, formula for that. Okay. So now I know the LTV. So go back to go back to the original deal. So I know the LTV now. Right? So my, uh, I gotta remember with my original question was because.

Stephen Fox: [00:17:58] So what are other what are other metrics?

Pete Neubig: [00:18:00] LTVs, right. So yeah. So now I've got my metrics. So my first metric that you would like for me to know is my LTV.

Stephen Fox: [00:18:06] Yeah. The next metric you want to know is on average how many leads you're generating per month. Right. So you want to take an average of what it is before you start doing any marketing. And then what that is over time as well. Now you can't always compare one year versus the next, because in property management, as you probably know, there is market upswings and downswings. Right. But if you have the mindset of I'm going to be doing this for a decade and you calculate that number over the next decade or the next five years, that's a little bit better to measure. It's like the equivalent of measuring the return of a financial advisor by looking at one year of returns in the in the market. Right. You can't really do that. But what you want to do is over a long period of time, have a track record and figure out, okay, how many leads are we generating per month on average? Another metric that you want to take into factor is what's your close rate. So that's important to you as well. And that one's important as well to to know down pat. Um, because you want to be able to calculate, okay, how many more leads do we need to bring in to hit our goals?

Pete Neubig: [00:19:20] I'm going to pause you there. Uh, the lead thing, I think is incredibly important. And you you kind of glossed over it a little bit. The big question I have, though, and I think this is hard for everybody. So I want to know if you have a really good way of doing this. How do I track those leads? Because we might be using five different methods to market. Right? I might have somebody go into different brokers offices, I might have some online ads. I might be into doing some, um, some video blogs, things of that nature. How do you track the leads? Like is it just as easy as how do you how do you hear about us type stuff as you're answering the phone and just putting it in a spreadsheet? Is it and then is it more robust? Like, do I have to connect it to a CRM system or everything in between?

Stephen Fox: [00:20:07] So it depends on the method you're using. So if you're using paid ads, you should be able to track the lead directly from the paid ad. Um, that's easy to set up. If it's something where you have a BDM and they're going out and visiting different brokers offices trying to get referrals, then it'd be more a matter, you have to manually input that into a CRM. So having a CRM is super important once you start to generate a significant amount of leads. That's one thing I think a lot of people do get backwards. And I will mention if you're generating like five leads a month, you don't need a CRM.

Pete Neubig: [00:20:41] You don't need a CRM.

Stephen Fox: [00:20:42] Right?

Pete Neubig: [00:20:42] You definitely don't need HubSpot.

Stephen Fox: [00:20:44] Yeah, exactly. Like focus on getting the leads in before you start investing in a CRM, because that's the priority at this point. But yeah, once you get to a significant point, let's say you're generating 50 to 100 leads a month. At that point, there's going to be certain sources that you can track directly to where it came from. Like I was mentioning a paid ad campaign. And then another thing that you can do that's just super simple is on any contact form on your site, just put a field. How did you hear about us? Um, even for our own company at Upkeep Media like we have, if you go to any of our contact forums, we'll ask you. Where did you hear about us? It's not a perfect match all the time, but over an extended period of time, you're going to get a pretty good.

Pete Neubig: [00:21:25] The data smooths out over time.

Stephen Fox: [00:21:27] Exactly.

Pete Neubig: [00:21:28] Okay.

Stephen Fox: [00:21:28] So yeah, you're going to have to manually ask sometimes if someone calls in, just ask. People don't mind answering that question.

Pete Neubig: [00:21:36] No you're right. Um, I'll say early on in the Empire days when we were just starting out, the first couple of years, few years, we literally just had everything in a spreadsheet and a contact form came in and they said, this is how we heard about us. We literally put the lead, and we had a column for lead and rows for the source, and we would just put in the numbers for each lead source. And, and if somebody called us, how did you hear about us? And that's how we did it for many years before we before we connected everything to our, our CRM system, which was HubSpot.

Stephen Fox: [00:22:05] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:22:05] Okay. So if I have a lead problem, then we know it's a marketing challenge. And we got to call Upkeep Media right away to get to get the lead flow to grow. You said now the next thing you said was sales was conversion rate, which 100% agree. So talk a little bit about what that looks like and how do you track that as well. What's the metric behind that.

Stephen Fox: [00:22:25] In terms of your conversion rate?

Pete Neubig: [00:22:27] In terms of. Yeah, in terms of the conversion rate.

Stephen Fox: [00:22:29] We're talking about closing rate or conversion rate from a website?

Pete Neubig: [00:22:33] Oh I'm sorry. You know what? Great call out. I was thinking closing rate. Yeah. You know, I call it conversion rate, but it's the it's the sales. Conversion from leads is kind of what I was thinking, but, um, why don't you talk about both.

Stephen Fox: [00:22:44] For closing rate? I mean, it's as simple as. How many leads do we get in? How many of them were qualified. So I would keep track of that as well, because you will get some leads that call that are just not qualified at all. You kind of have to determine what is considered a qualified lead for your company, and then keeping track of of those qualified leads that moved to a sales call. How many of them sign up and become a client of ours? Um, it's as simple as that for tracking your closing rate.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:13] Do you track by by person that signs up or by number of door door count, or do you do both?

Stephen Fox: [00:23:19] I would probably do by person that signs up. Reason being is especially if you have...

Pete Neubig: [00:23:25] It looks like you have a great month. One guy signed up with 20 doors.

Stephen Fox: [00:23:28] Exactly, especially if you have a salesperson like a BDM, and you want to keep track of how effective they are. As you just said, if you can have, maybe they got lucky. They got one person that was really hot, like ready to sign up right away and they had 20 doors. That person looks fantastic. But then you look and you're like, wait a second. They spoke with 50 people and they only signed up this one person that had 20 doors. There's probably something wrong with our sales process, so I would recommend you can do both, but I would definitely recommend tracking by person.

Pete Neubig: [00:24:00] Yeah. Another thing you said that I think is is super important is you said have an MQL or a marketing qualified lead. And so if you're in property management, not all leads are equal. Right. And you said like there's this some people like we used to have people that would call us and say I'm interested in property management. Awesome. What's the address to the house? Well, I'm I don't own one yet. I'm thinking about buying one. That's not a marketing qualified lead. That's just a lead. But not we used to call them opportunities just to make it a little bit different. But but that's not a hot lead or a qualified lead. So you need to...

Stephen Fox: [00:24:33] I mean it depends. Like we work with some companies where they like those types of leads because they want to be able to actually sell them an investment property. So then you can classify it into two different buckets, right? You can have people that already own a property looking for property management, and you can have individuals that are looking to purchase an investment property.

Pete Neubig: [00:24:53] That makes sense. Completely makes sense. Yeah. But not all leads are equal. And then you have your conversion rate. Now do you do conversion rate from MQL or qualified lead or from just a main lead or both. And just kind of keep an eye on it.

Stephen Fox: [00:25:07] In terms of from a sales call that comes in?

Pete Neubig: [00:25:11] Mhm. Like so like you know because I mean also when your sales people do they just in your, in your mind here are salespeople just reaching out to the MQLs or are they reaching out to all the leads? Just in case.

Stephen Fox: [00:25:25] They're reaching out to all the leads.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:27] So the leads.

Stephen Fox: [00:25:28] There's also no way to necessarily know if someone's qualified or not before they speak.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:32] You do the best you can. Sure.

Stephen Fox: [00:25:34] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:35] Uh, and so then are you is your conversion rate then, like, I got this one guy or two people from all, like, do you, do you break out the qualified leads versus the regular leads and look at those differences in conversion? Or do you just look at just one number.

Stephen Fox: [00:25:50] I would I would probably separate both. Again this is not something that we specialize in. We're not on the sales side. So we're on.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:56] The I know. I'm getting I'm asking you I'm asking you stuff that's out of your wheelhouse and I get it.

Stephen Fox: [00:26:00] But we still have a fair amount of these types of conversations with our clients. So I would personally separate both. Um, the more data you have, the better armed you are at the end of the day.

Pete Neubig: [00:26:11] All right. So let's let's kind of pivot. And uh, we got a few more minutes here. So let's kind of pivot and let's, let's go give me some other...um as a marketing guru. Let's just let's just bullet point. Give me some other ideas that people that people can do that maybe are not doing, that can grow their company with.

Stephen Fox: [00:26:32] I'm definitely not a marketing guru. I won't tell myself that. But, um, so one thing I will point out is...

Pete Neubig: [00:26:40] Marketing czar. We'll give we'll give you marketing czar.

Stephen Fox: [00:26:42] Yeah. All right, I appreciate it. That is not self-touted. Um, but one thing I would say people don't realize is everyone thinks about just going directly after the owner. I would say at least 10 to 15% of your marketing time should be spent on trying to build up referral partners as well. So that is one strategy that I definitely recommend that you start to focus on a little bit more. If you are not, it's building up referral partnerships with realtors, with mortgage brokers, with literally anyone that deals with a rental property owner on a regular basis. Um, so that would be one thing. Uh, the next thing that you should be doing is something we touched on, but not only focusing on Google starting to focus on YouTube as well. YouTube is the second largest search engine...

Pete Neubig: [00:27:33] I almost thought you'd say focus on Yahoo! I was gonna be like, oh what?

Stephen Fox: [00:27:36] N o, no no. No. Um, that that maybe 15 years ago, but not anymore. Um, but but yeah, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, right? And not only that, it's better at converting people. The reason being is when you're on video, someone gets a good understanding of who you are. They'll start to follow your content and you'll see what happens is when they reach out, they're going to call as if they know you, which is kind of a strange thing to happen. Some stranger on the internet reaches out. They start talking to you as if you've had multiple conversations. But that's the beauty of it, right? When someone comes to your website, they read a couple articles. When they reach out, they don't know who they're going to be working with, whereas when they find you through YouTube. They feel like they have a pretty good understanding of who you are, and kind of the type of personality that you have. So that would be another method that you should definitely start to focus on.

Pete Neubig: [00:28:29] I love that. So you're saying focus on Google and YouTube. But we gotta we gotta talk about this other stuff. What about the Facebook, Insta, Tiki-Tok, all those other crap.

Stephen Fox: [00:28:39] Tik-Tok.

Pete Neubig: [00:28:41] Like, you know, like where do they fit in on this? Because they take a lot of freaking time, man.

Stephen Fox: [00:28:47] Yeah. So generally if we're talking about just putting up posts on social media like Facebook, Instagram, as you were talking about, um, those are what we've seen are going to help more on the tenant side. So as far as getting rental owners, I would not focus on that right away unless you're dominating the other platforms, if you're doing great on everywhere else and you want to continue to expand online, go for it. If you're at a point where you have barely any following on YouTube. You should definitely be focusing your time and resources on that before focusing on social media. Where social media can work well though, is as a remarketing tool. So someone visits your website, they go on your site, they leave your site. If you don't do anything to stay top of mind with them, they'll never hear from you again. But what you can do is you can run retargeting ads, meaning anyone who visits your site, you can now run ads specifically to those individuals when they log in to Facebook. Now they were on Pete Neubig Property management. They left your site. All of a sudden they go into Facebook, they start seeing ads for your business everywhere they go. The reason why that's so powerful is because on average, in today's, uh, today's day and age, people need around 7 to 8 touchpoints before they even start to trust a brand. So if they leave your site and never hear from you again. They're going to forget about you. They probably looked at three other competitors that same day.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:19] And that's something that upkeep media can help with. Right. You guys can help with those retargeting of ads.

Stephen Fox: [00:30:25] Definitely. The important point, though, is you need to have a lot of people finding you before it makes sense. If you have no one finding you online, you have no one to retarget, right?

Pete Neubig: [00:30:36] Which is brilliant because you guys can help with that too.

Stephen Fox: [00:30:38] Yeah, exactly. But basically, that's where social media is probably the most effective for the majority of property management companies out there.

Pete Neubig: [00:30:47] I heard something recently. I want to get your opinion on it. I heard that if you're doing $1 million or less a year, that you should only focus on one platform with like one message. Um, what are your thoughts on that?

Stephen Fox: [00:31:03] Yeah, I mean, I would say that's pretty bang on, to be honest. Um. You can like..

Pete Neubig: [00:31:11] Example, let's say, I'm Pete Property Management. And I'm doing less than a million bucks a year in revenue. Um, but I have a YouTube channel, a TikTok channel, an Insta channel, an X channel, a Facebook channel. Um. It's like...

Stephen Fox: [00:31:30] It's too much.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:30] I think it's too much, right?

Stephen Fox: [00:31:32] No, definitely. Because you're spreading your resources thin. If you're doing less than a million bucks a year, you don't have the bandwidth to be doing all of these things well. So what ends up happening is you do each one half ass, and because of that, you don't get results from any of them. So rather than trying to spread yourself too thin, just take all of that effort and put it into one area that you know can generate returns. Um, so that's not saying like, go put all your efforts into the newest social media platform that just came out. Go in something like YouTube where you know you can generate business from it. You know, there's property management companies that are doing multiple seven figures that are doing very well from YouTube, and focus all your efforts on that one platform until you start to see returns. So never mind. Even if you're doing under $1 million a year, just point blank is don't start to focus on multiple avenues until you're dominating one. Dominate one, get really good at it. Get it to a point where it's almost automated, and then start to focus on a second one and then do one by one.

Pete Neubig: [00:32:43] I'm going to ask you one more question before we hit, before we hit break. And it just popped in my head and has nothing to do with anything other than I just I'm interested. So hopefully other people listening are interested. Um, do you do looking at sessions on your website, you know, and looking at that trend over time, is that important? Is that an important metric to look at and.

Stephen Fox: [00:33:08] Yeah, definitely.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:09] It is. Okay. So you want to see it go up obviously.

Stephen Fox: [00:33:13] Yeah. So you're talking about at least from what I understand, you're talking about looking at your analytics, right. Looking at how many visitors are visiting your site on a regular basis.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:22] Exactly. And then there's a breakdown and the type of visitors. Can you talk a little bit about that, just a little bit.

Stephen Fox: [00:33:28] So you want to look at where these visitors are coming from and what pages they're visiting. So your website. One thing we haven't touched on is as a as an SFR or property management company, your website is geared towards the owner. It really you can get tenants through it, but that should not be your main focus. You're going to get your tenants through the listing sites. As an owner, as a website that's focused on owners, you want to make sure that the traffic you're getting to your site is coming through owners. So there can be the odd occasion where maybe your website traffic is kind of flat, but you're getting more lead flow, and that can happen because all of a sudden, the amount of people that are finding your listings page goes down. But there's people, but there's more people that are finding you through owner related queries. So that kind of, uh, counteracts the the decrease from the listings. But in general, yes. Like you should be seeing your website traffic go up over time. You do want to pay attention to that. Um, but most importantly, you want to pay attention to your lead flow. Like, are you getting more leads or are you getting less leads? And that's kind of the most important thing to keep track of.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:42] Stephen, I can talk to you all day. I have so many more questions. We may have to do a second, uh, a second pod on this, but we're running out of time. So, um, we're going to hit the commercial break, and then we're gonna put you in the lightning round. Sorry, everybody. Because I could literally I got like, ten more questions I need to ask them, so. All right, we'll be right back after this, everybody.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:12] All right, we're back. Everybody. Welcome back. All right. Stephen, are you ready for the lightning round?

Stephen Fox: [00:35:18] I'm ready. Let's do it.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:19] All right. Let's do it. Okay, here we go. All right, I'm actually gonna ask you a different question. I ask normal people. Normal everybody else. My first question is, do you believe that remote team members can do some of the marketing functions for an SFR company?

Stephen Fox: [00:35:36] Definitely. I think there's certain things, like social media posting that we're talking about before, where you can have a remote team or remote team member do the work just as well as somebody that's local. Um, yeah. So to answer that question for sure.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:51] And you can find qualified people on vpmsolutions.com just saying. Okay. Um, what CRM system do you recommend?

Stephen Fox: [00:35:59] Um, so. Honestly, it depends on the size of your business. One that a lot of our clients use is LeadSimple because it's built specifically for the property management industry, so I'd probably go with that.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:10] I love it. Great answer. Good partners of ours. All right. Um, you talked about BDMs, so I'm not going to ask a question about BDMs, but I will ask, what is one piece of advice you would give someone just starting out in the PM business?

Stephen Fox: [00:36:24] So in turn, I'll take this from the standpoint in terms of growth, because I can't touch on the operation side. I'm not a property manager myself. But in terms of growth, when you're first starting out, you have more time than money generally. That is a time where you need to use bootstrap techniques. So that is where you can go out. You can create a Facebook group dedicated to real estate investors in your market. You can go on BiggerPockets answer all the different questions that people might have. Um, you can go and start networking with people that can potentially refer you clients like realtors or mortgage brokers. Um, so that would be kind of the advice in terms of generating leads, but also don't just focus on the short term, because eventually you're going to want to be able to generate leads that are reaching out to you versus you having to go out to them. And in order to do that, you're going to need to create content that provides value to rental property owners in your market. Start focusing on that as well from day one, so make it a goal of yours. I'm going to shoot one video per week that educates rental property owners in my market. Post that on YouTube. They're not going to be great at first, but over time you're going to get better. No one's great the first time they do anything right. So get out there, start creating content and start posting on YouTube. Create articles for your site. Just as Pete said before, you can take that video, embed it on your site, and then transcribe it so they have written content to go with it as well.

Pete Neubig: [00:37:54] Great advice. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Stephen Fox: [00:38:00] Definitely a fan. I'm actually a big pineapple hot pepper pizza fan.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:04] Interesting.

Stephen Fox: [00:38:06] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:06] He is from Canada, folks. So yeah, it was.

Stephen Fox: [00:38:08] My father in law introduced me to that one and it stuck.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:12] Um, favorite fast food restaurant?

Stephen Fox: [00:38:16] Ooh, I don't eat fast food. I'm, uh.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:18] If you had to. What's your...

Stephen Fox: [00:38:20] If I had to it would probably...

Pete Neubig: [00:38:21] Maybe you had too much to drink one night, and you're a little hung, and you need some fast food to.

Stephen Fox: [00:38:26] Yeah. So we don't have this where I live. Um, because I live in Montreal and everything is French, so we don't get any of the good stuff. But anytime I have the opportunity...

Pete Neubig: [00:38:35] You'll live a lot longer, healthier lives than everybody else.

Stephen Fox: [00:38:37] I don't know about that. We probably drink too much wine to make up for it or something. Um, but probably a Popeyes hot chicken sandwich.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:47] Popeyes hot chicken.

Stephen Fox: [00:38:47] That would be my move. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:48] All right. That'd be your go to. I like that. What was your first job?

Stephen Fox: [00:38:52] First job was. I used to play basketball, so my first job was a basketball referee. And then my first actual job, let's say, at a company was, uh. I used to pull the, uh, new clothes off of a truck for Old Navy. And, man, did I hate that.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:10] What is something that most people don't know about you?

Stephen Fox: [00:39:13] Something that most people don't know about me? I mean, most people probably don't know me. Um, so. But something people don't know about me would probably be that I love to collect shoes. Um, so I've probably got way too many shoes. I think I have, like, 50 something pairs of shoes.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:33] Uh, you need to meet Peter Hernandez, who used to work with me at VPM. That guy has a shoe collection, too. You guys can geek out about shoes.

Stephen Fox: [00:39:42] Okay.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:42] What is one book you're currently reading or one that has impacted your business or life?

Stephen Fox: [00:39:48] Um, I actually have it right here. It's, uh, this one, this book very good. Uh, it's called Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson.

Pete Neubig: [00:39:59] Never Enough.

Stephen Fox: [00:39:59] Um, yeah. So I actually just finished this book maybe two weeks ago, but it was a good read. It's basically about Andrew Wilkinson, who is a business investor, uh, based out of Victoria, British Columbia, but he owns at this point, he I think he's like 38 years old and he owns about 40 to 50 different businesses. Um, and he just kind of he's...

Pete Neubig: [00:40:22] Oh he's just this, uh, this generation's Warren Buffett, huh?

Stephen Fox: [00:40:25] That's exactly it. He's, uh, he's known as kind of the mini Warren Buffett.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:30] Warren Buffett's, like 90. So he's got a lot of he's got a lot of runway to get to, uh, to get to where Warren Buffett was.

Stephen Fox: [00:40:36] Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:38] What is one challenge you are facing in your business?

Stephen Fox: [00:40:42] Um. People say just making sure our team continues to grow, continues to learn and is, you know, better educated in property management.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:54] I think you tell me all those crummy property management clients. Yeah.

Stephen Fox: [00:40:58] Honestly, I think, um, there's always the exception. But in general, the property management industry is filled with like, really nice and good people.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:06] Agreed. 100% agreed. Uh, dogs or cats? Which one?

Stephen Fox: [00:41:10] I have a dog, so I definitely have to go with dogs.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:13] What kind of dog?

Stephen Fox: [00:41:14] Um, he's a mix between a Chihuahua, and we don't know what. We adopted him, actually, from Houston. Funny enough, they flew him down at, like, two years old. Uh, but he's part Chihuahua, part something bigger. Because he's. He's bigger than a Chihuahua.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:30] I work with an organization, um, that we foster every once in a while for them, and they're always shipping dogs up north, uh, north US. And, uh, I didn't know we had Canada, but yeah, it's called Freedom Street Rescue. They're smaller. They're smaller. Owned by my buddy and his wife. They do about they save about 220 dogs a year, and they're shipping them all up, like, uh, northeast a lot. Um, yeah.

Stephen Fox: [00:41:56] And that might be where we got him from, actually.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:58] That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool

Stephen Fox: [00:42:02] So it was, it was literally a company in Houston, that only sent them to the northeast.

Pete Neubig: [00:42:06] Oh, that's really interesting there's a few of them out there. All right Stephen somebody heard this. They're like, Holy crap, this guy is the I need to talk to him. How to get in touch with you?

Stephen Fox: [00:42:16] Yeah. Um, visit our website at upkeepmedia.com/growth. One thing we offer to any property management company out there is what we call a property management lead gen analysis. And basically it's a free 30-minute educational call. You're going to sign up for a time that's convenient for you to speak, and then a team member of ours is going to reach out at that time, and they'll walk you through a few things, so they'll show you what your competitors are doing to bring on new properties to manage. So they'll show you what strategies they're using. They'll show you where you're currently positioned from an online standpoint, and then give you some recommendations on things you can focus on to grow your business, regardless of whether or not we work together. So really, our goal is to provide as much value as we can if we're a good fit and we can help you, we'd love to do so. If we're not, that's perfectly fine. We still want you to have left that call being like, okay, I learned something that was not a waste of my 30 minutes.

Pete Neubig: [00:43:14] And if you are not a member of NARPM, please go to narpm.org or call them at (800) 782-3452. And if you need a marketing assistant, social media, uh, you know, marketer or any kind of marketing help that does not need to be in the office, think of vpmsolutions.com. We're a direct hire platform that's free for you to use. Reach out to me personally, pete@vpmsolutions.com I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you all have. Stephen, thank you so much for being here today, buddy.

Stephen Fox: [00:43:50] Thanks so much, Pete.