How often are you interrupted in your property management business? Tenant and owner phone calls, emails, maintenance requests, team member questions… it's an endless cycle of wasted time and stolen profits.

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss the hidden thief in every property management business: the Interruption Burglar.

You'll Learn

[01:23 ] The Burglar Stealing From Your Business 

[07:41 ] Becoming Aware of Your Company's Time Loss

[13:20 ] If Your Business Isn't Growing, It is Dying

Quotables

"There's a burglar that lives inside everybody's business."

"One interruption is going to cost you somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes of wasted labor."

"All it takes is questions to make you conscious of things you're unconscious of currently."

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00 )

Nobody can even see this guy running around stealing until we do some of these exercises with our clients.

And then they start to become conscious and they can now see this interruption burglar sneaking around, stealing money, stealing profits, wasting everybody's time.

Welcome everybody. We are Jason and Sarah Hull the owners of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses, helping them add doors.

improve pricing, increase profit, simplify operations, and we run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. We are the best in the world. And at DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to relationships, real estate deals, and residual income. And our mission at DoorGrow.

is to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. All right, so today, Sarah and I thought we would chat about, she said, you've been wanting to talk about this for a little while. So we're going to be chatting about what? Interruption. All right, specifically,

the interruption burglar. So maybe I'm dating myself a little bit, but I don't know if you remember the Hamburglar. I do. McDonald's, okay, all right, that's good. so for those of you listening, maybe you remember like McDonald's had the Hamburglar and he was this sneaky, creepy guy going around stealing people's cheeseburgers, right? And there's another burglar. There's a burglar that lives inside everybody's business.

and it's the interruption burglar. And the interruption burglar is stealing your money by interrupting. And so every interruption in a business is a hidden thief stealing from your business. And most business owners give a blank check out to every tenant and owner that they bring on that says, call me whenever you want to, interrupt me whenever you want to, steal all my profits.

And a lot of property managers think they have to talk to everybody and that's what they're paid to do. And so they have to always be available. So we're going to kind of throw a wrench into that sort of level of thinking because we've talked to lot of clients get out of the trap of lacking profit, lacking margin by helping them escape or eliminate or tear up this blank check and eliminate the interruption burglar, or at least put some guardrails around that guy.

so according to Gary Keller's book, The One Thing, it cites a study saying that one interruption costs 18 minutes of productivity. Dan Martel's book about time management says I think it's like 26 minutes of productivity. So I don't know if we're just that much worse when we get interrupted now. But basically

One interruption is going to cost you somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes of wasted labor. Why? Because when we get interrupted, if we're in the flow or we're working on things and we're being productive as a team member or as a CEO or COO or whatever our role is, we get interrupted. We then have to rebuild that house of cards that we were in the middle of working on, figure out where was I, what was I working on,

you know, kind of reestablish our thinking, get back into the groove of what we were trying to accomplish, what we were working on, especially when we're trying to get into deep work where things get really productive and effective. And so one interruption, if it happens every 20 minutes or so, which in a property management business is not hard to do, you may find you feel like you're just spinning your wheels or your team members are working and busy all day long, but they're not actually producing a whole lot of output.

And so this can be very expensive in a property management business. Not only that, but usually a lot of times the interruptions are internal. So you ever heard of sneaker net? Like somebody walks into your office, it's the most inefficient network ever, and then you're like, hey, do you got a minute? Or I have this question, and maybe you're the person they're all coming to ask questions to because you're the boss, and they're interrupting you all the time. And so then you're like, well, getting interrupted. And now you've got two people.

One's interrupting the other and you're wasting a lot of labor. And then we set up scenarios in which one person has the ability to interrupt multiple people in the business. This is where we set up Slack channels and other stupid communication methodologies that people think is more productive, where there's one too many communication, which becomes one too many interruptions. So one interruption, instead of costing you like maybe 15, 20 minutes of labor or a half hour of labor,

It can quadruple. It can be 10 people at a time. It can be really expensive. And then, you know, sometimes, you know, one's interrupting the other. So you've got it's doubling. You know, people are just wasting your time and money. And so it's really easy for you to lose all of your profits and all your margins to staff through interruptions and a lack of productivity. And we see people get stuck at small door counts on a per

person basis. They're like, I can only manage 50 units by myself, or a property manager with a whole team, I can only manage 100 units. And a lot of people think, well, that's pretty good, but it's not. Sarah managed 265 at her peak, basically by herself. Eventually had one part-time person. I had one part-time person. Yeah, eventually. was part-time, but between us we

You weren't even a full-time equivalent. Yeah, and that's because you had eliminated a lot of interruptions because you just didn't want to deal with them. And you set really good boundaries.

Well, yeah, which was to not be interrupted. Yeah. So cool. So that's the interruption burglar. This is one of the things we help clients figure out. We help them figure out how do we eliminate the interruptions? How do we create better, healthier, more effective communication systems

Sometimes your clients do this. Sometimes your team members do it. Yeah. We've got to be able to separate ourselves where we can and reduce or completely eliminate interruptions. Yeah. That's the goal. So we have methodologies that we take our clients through to, one, identify their own

interruptions, the things that are interrupting them. And then we have a process for taking their team through a process so that they become conscious of the interruptions so that they can, everybody in the business can start to protect the business from this interruption burglar because interruption burglar, sneaky. Nobody can even see this guy running around stealing until we do some of these exercises with our clients.

And then they start to become conscious and they can now see this interruption burglar sneaking around, stealing money, stealing profits, wasting everybody's time. And nobody likes the interruptions anyway. So by reducing them, everybody's happier. Even the people that are interrupting you, like tenants and owners are happier and less anxious. If you set better guardrails, better expectations, better boundaries, they actually can trust you more to do the job instead of feeling like they need to micromanage the person that's managing

their rental property, which is ridiculous. Why don't they just cut you out if they're going to micromanage something, right? So yeah, they don't need to do that. Okay. I don't know what else we need to say about this, but. Well, one of the things that I had created recently within the last two months was