The Multifamily Innovation® Podcast
Patrick Antrim, Founder and CEO of Multifamily Leadership, Producers of the Multifamily Leadership Innovation & AI Summit, the Multifamily Women® Summit, and the Best Places to Work Multifamily® will bring you success strategies for Multifamily CEOs, executive leaders and aspiring leaders that want to drive high performance results for their portfolio.
The Multifamily Innovation® Podcast
Why It Matters to Centralize Property Management Communications
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Communication failures are silently sabotaging multifamily operations. Between overflowing inboxes, missed text messages, and information scattered across multiple platforms, your teams are spending countless hours searching for information while important details fall through the cracks.
In this eye-opening discussion, Jim Rostel, COO at Anchor Northwest Property Group, shares a harrowing story about facing a lawsuit eight months after a property disaster, only to discover critical communications were inaccessible after an employee left the company. This real-world example highlights how our industry's fragmented communication approaches create serious business liabilities that extend far beyond day-to-day frustrations.
Jason Griffith, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Synco, explains why property management needs specialized communication tools rather than generic platforms built for every industry. "Most people are using the same software for communications that the local dog kennel, barbershop, and Department of Defense use," he notes. "It has nothing to do with property management, which is why the current way of doing business causes so much pain."
The conversation reveals how centralizing communications creates transparency from "boardroom to boiler room," allowing executives to monitor critical situations in real-time without micromanaging. We explore how features like instant translation help diverse maintenance teams communicate effectively, and how integrating communications from other alert systems eliminates inbox overload.
Most compelling is Jim's insight on implementation: the executives initially most resistant to change became the platform's biggest champions once they experienced the benefits. "This is one of those questions like as an executive, once you make the move to a new way, why would you go back?" he asks.
Whether you're considering centralization initiatives or simply tired of information falling through the cracks, this discussion provides a practical framework for rethinking your communication strategy. How much more could your team accomplish if they weren't constantly searching for information across multiple platforms?
About the Multifamily Innovation® Council:
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is the executive level membership organization that makes a difference in your bottom line, drives a better experience for your employees, and allows you an experience that keeps demand strong for your company. The council is uniquely positioned to focus on the intersection of Leadership, Technology, AI, and Innovation.
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is for Multifamily Business leaders who want to unlock value inside their organization so they can create better experiences and drive profitability inside their company.
To learn more or to join, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com.
For more information and to engage with leaders shaping the future of multifamily innovation, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com/.
Connect:
Multifamily Innovation® Council: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/
Introduction to Communication Challenges
Speaker 1All right, well, welcome back. Today. What we're doing is we're talking about the biggest challenges of multifamily operations and that can be oftentimes simple as communication and, more specifically, we're talking about how decentralized let me just say disjointed communication is holding teams back is holding teams back, and many of you know this. This is communication at the maintenance level, the operational level, investment level, vendor level. There's all kinds of things that rely on this to make business happen. And I've got two industry leaders here joined with us today on the podcast. They've looked at this inside out. I have Jim Rostel. He's the chief operating officer at Anchor Northwest Property Group and Jim is he's been a recognized leader in this. He's centralized already his property management and he has is serving the council with this deep expertise on. You know, the things that are necessary in operations, sales, marketing, customer experience and he's built this already right. He's implemented a fully integrated centralized management system and many of you know and he's been seen on expert panels around speaking and obviously he's seen in the council talking about this as an expert. So a lot of people respect him around this conversation. He has a different point of view on this.
Speaker 1And then also we've got Jason Griffith. He's a co-founder and co-CEO of Synco and Synco is this real-time really one of the most beautiful softwares I will say I've seen. But it's a real-time messaging platform and it's built specifically for property management teams. You start to think about the tools we use today and they're not really built for the unique business operation. But Jason's been just a seasoned veteran around prop tech. He's done some great things before this and I'm always excited to watch him what he builds.
Speaker 1But Synco is designed to eliminate this email overload and you're looking at not just direct communication that you may do with peers and colleagues and investors, vendors, all that stuff but also at the property level, the direct, even the unit level, right, this communication and what we're aiming to do here is how do we think about integrating all this communication seamlessly into the systems that we already use, right? That's a nice thing to have that too. So Jason's going to help us understand that point of view on the tools and the tech that help solve some of the things. I wanted to bring Jim on here, who's working through those things.
Communication Before & After Synco
Speaker 1So, jim, I'd love to start with you on this. We had a call or we talked in another form around this sort of most obvious and glaring limitation that happens if you're centralizing, when your teams are using all these different things to communicate in these systems. Take me through what that was like before you made some certain investments in Synco and some other initiatives. What was that like before and what is that like now in terms of communication in all these disparate systems?
Speaker 2Thanks, patrick. I think in general, you look at any organization any organization I've been a part of over my 30 plus year career and the one thing that all great organizations have in common is they're great communicators. And the reality is and what Synco has done that I think is really brilliant here is they're creating a product specific for our industry, right, specific to our needs and understanding the nuances of what we do and allowing us to improve our communication process. So if you look at any organization, any type of change, any type of thing you're going through, you want to make sure you have a communication strategy and a platform on which you can communicate amongst departments, amongst individuals, and do so in a manner that is organized and scalable.
Speaker 2So you know, for us, you know, we've always been pretty much centralized, like from the get-go. That's just the way we evolved. But what we found after gosh 10 years of being centralized was that the communication piece was very, very difficult for us and that everything in our system is very siloed. So very rarely do you have one person that takes a job from point A to point Z. It goes through multiple people throughout that process. To give you an idea, if you lease a property with us, you're going to meet with five different people by the time you move in right, and so if you don't have great communication structure amongst that process, throughout that process, you're going to have problems. So, yes, communication is probably one of the most important things that we have and that leads to our success in a centralized model.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I would say, jason, just building on that from what Jim is setting up in terms of the communication, obviously we want to do things, but we need great companies communicate very well. Talk to us about what you've built and how you're going about solving that.
Speaker 3Yeah, so maybe a little bit of background on how I got here. As you had mentioned, patrick, I'm a two-time entrepreneur in the prop tech space. My previous company, sitecomply, built up over a decade. We were really focused in the New York market, helping leading owners and managers with a million units on the system maintain compliance with the crazy local laws that exist in New York. So we really got a front row seat in terms of how people communicate with critical issues, sold that business to Inhabit and joined up with my co-founders and we just started interviewing a lot of multifamily executives and what we heard over and over, similar to what Jim said, was the following you take a typical property manager they get 300 emails a day. You've got people on all different sorts of communication systems and you stop and think when you first ask someone how do you communicate, they might answer Outlook or Teams, right. But then when you just sort of peel back the layer a little bit, what they say is well, we use Teams over here, we use it for video calls, sometimes we chat, but we get 300 emails a day. But also we use text messaging and, of course, our field team sometimes use WhatsApp and somewhere between.
Speaker 3All of that is how we communicate, and what struck us was that this is an industry that has gotten very used to, on the accounting side, having a centralized platform. I mean, it would be crazy if you said, well, where do you keep your rent information? Oh well, we keep it somewhere between these seven systems. No, you have Yardi or Resmin or what have you right. So you bring a new property manager very easy to say show me the history of rent payments for this building, for this unit. But you bring in that same property manager who wants to see the history of team communication for that same unit. That's impossible, and I think that this industry has almost been like a frog boiling in the pot. It's just such a painful product problem that has gotten progressively worse over time as operations have gotten more complicated, that people just become accustomed to living in the pain right.
Legal Risks of Scattered Communication
Speaker 3And so what we built at Synco was a centralized communication platform for communications across the enterprise, from boardroom to boiler room, where all communications are on one platform. It's in real time, it understands what buildings are, what units are. It organizes all of those communications by building, by unit, by project, by vendor, what have you. It interacts with the outside world in the same way that property management firms do all day long and I think, importantly, it starts talking to your other systems as well. So that's the basics of what we built, and I think Jim is just a great example of how he married the concept of centralization, which is so important to our industry, with technology to make sure that you unlock the full potential of a centralization program where different teams and groups and people can be seamlessly interacting to make that as frictionless as possible.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, jim, I have a question for you, and Jason was talking about you know, we we tend to grow accustomed to uh scenarios that why do we hold on to these situations that aren't serving us, uh, for so long? Uh, maybe it's just not a lot of well, first of all, there's not a lot of options for what you've created, right? So, uh, you're in a good. But why do you think, jim, people accept these conditions of you know, do these workarounds and end up in all these different channels to communicate and it could be passed on to other things? We do accept conditions, sometimes far too long. Anything you want to share on that one.
Speaker 2Yeah, no, I think it's true If any company, any industry, that people get comfortable and they do what they're comfortable doing.
Speaker 3If I know how to do something.
Speaker 2That's how I'm going to do it right, wrong or otherwise right and so having to learn something new is always going to be a bit of a lift for employees. Some people are going to be eager to do it, other people are going to be resistant and go from there, but I mean, I think it's just that comfort level. Once you get into this, once you get into a new system that works, it truly works you find that people at that point will never want to go back, right.
Speaker 1So you know you've got a good product in your hand, but people are like no, we need that, we have to stay with this yeah, and let me dive into something a little bit more specific around what the problem around the you know, having this information in all these different places, what, what are the risks that could go wrong there? You know, nine months after a situation, you know, and then you know how even litigious our industry can be. Or you know you've got to prove something, or or it could be anything from employment to legal to incidents at properties. How important is it to get this stuff right and get ownership, this data, in other words, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, it's huge. It's huge. We had an incident last year where we lost an entire property to a busted sprinkler system and eight months later a lawsuit shows up on our doorstep and discovery and they want every piece of communication that went in from the time that pipe broke until three weeks afterwards. And the reality was this is eight months later. We have one person that left the company and we cleaned his phone off and there was no record of any of his text messages at that point. And just the time it took for us to gather all that communications from emails, from getting individuals' phones and texts, emails from getting individual's phones and texts from Teams messages and just figuring out where they are was huge. I mean, it was a huge, huge problem for us.
Speaker 2We have since obviously switched to Synco, so everything on every event goes into Synco. So if I need anything at this point with this new solution, I just go there. We have a thread set up for that specific issue and everything we have is right in one slot. It doesn't matter if people have left the company or not. We keep the information on the cloud and it's there for our access at any time.
Speaker 1This is one of those questions like as an executive, once you make the move to a new way, why would you go back if you had that? Jason, tell me a little bit more about how that happens, Maybe even technically or, you know, with the platform. Uh, Jim's talking about a lot of risk management stuff. I start to bring the gravity of our fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we minimize this risk. What, uh, what are your thoughts there? Or maybe take us through how this works?
Organization & Accessibility Benefits
Speaker 3Yeah, there's a lot of different levels here, but like the nuts and bolts of it are. The first thing that we say is like, if you step back and really think about this, it is ludicrous to run your business on text and WhatsApp. I mean, with WhatsApp, you are literally locked out of your own information, right, because it's all you know, it's on the phone, it's secure. And with text, I mean, again, you don't want someone sharing pictures of their kid at home and then suddenly sensitive information about the firm because it's all in one place, et cetera. That's sort of bucket one, I think, from a just risk mitigation, best practices perspective. But I think the second thing that we find fascinating is, you know, I think most people in this industry use Outlook on some level, right. And when we speak to people and they talk about information organization, it's absolutely fascinating, especially when you compare it to what they live with right now, with Yardi or Entrata or what have you, which is most people will say that they spend a good chunk of time every day if they're trying to be organized, literally dragging messages on Outlook into folders, right, I mean, I've been in a room with 13 executives where each one says that they spend an hour, and what's so fascinating about that is like that's all well and good for the executive. I mean, I don't know if it's well and good because it's still an hour of your time every day, but it doesn't do any good for the organization, right? So you bring in a new executive. They they still start from zero. They start from a zero inbox. Hey everybody Patrick's new here Bring them up to speed. Suddenly you have 100 forwarded chains and you're like that's the norm.
Speaker 3And you know, we just thought to ourselves, like man, in an industry where you see turnover rates as high as they are, you need to be able to bring people up to speed on the history of team communications just as fast as you would bring them up to speed with important accounting information. And so the way it works on synco is that when you're having a thread of a conversation with a topic, one person can say you know, this topic is about unit 4B at the Hillcrest and, unlike Outlook, where that's an individual exercise that is now organized for everybody who has access to that thread, and whether that's the person who you know, whether that's a GM, right, who's looking in on that, or whether that's the person who comes here two years from that's a GM, right? Who's looking in on that? Or whether that's the person who comes here two years from now who is in charge of that building, who now wants to get a history down to the unit level. So that's sort of the mechanics of how it works.
Speaker 3But I think it's just so important to say, a we need to be on one system and B, that system needs to be organized and aligned with the way that companies do business. And, let's face it, our industry is very unique, prior to Synco, I think, and look, we're still a young, growing company. Most people are using the same software for communications that the local dog kennel and the barber shop and the barbershop and the Department of Defense use. It has nothing to do with property management, which is why the current way of doing business causes so much pain. And I think the other thing I would say is Jim spoke about a very acute issue, a lawsuit, which is very real, but just the day-to-day pain, right.
Speaker 3I mean, I remember there's a great organization, swift Bunny, which talks a lot about team communication, and they had released a report last year that talked about the frustrations that drive a lot of the turnover in the industry where you're a property manager or a regional manager and you're sitting there waiting for the person below you and the person above you to get back to you and you're just waiting and you can't do your job and you want to do your job and they're just like oh, I'm sorry, you were one of 312 emails I got today and I'll get to it at some point, but I think we've really been able to. As Jim can tell you, cinco makes everything faster and you're not buried in that same mountain. Yeah.
Speaker 1Hmm, Jim, anything you can share You've been through. Are you guys on board fully or are you in process?
Speaker 2Yeah, we're fully on board and we have been for gosh now four trigger on this thing and I'll be honest with you just fully transparent, not the entire executive team was on board. I mean, that was something that we got some people 75% of the way there. The people that were not on board are the people that are the biggest champions of it now.
Speaker 1This goes back to that comment you made about they're comfortable doing this forever. One way right Making that shift is, you know, overestimated in terms of the challenges.
Speaker 2Yeah, they're comfortable. I mean, I think the initial response in the pushback we got internally was it doesn't really do anything that we don't already do. And to some extent that's true. You know you can get a Geo Metro car and it does the same thing a Mercedes does. Right, it's going to drive you from point A to point B. You may have some issues, you may not get there as quickly, but you know you'll get there right Once you get on board.
Speaker 2This is not what it does. It's how it does it and how much power it gives you in retrospect. Right, it's like taking all of your communications from all of your if you've got site teams we don't. But if you have site teams, from all your site teams, from all your regional management, from all your executive people, putting it in one place. And not only putting it in one place but putting it in a filing cabinet where you can find that communication.
Speaker 2What happened at this eviction? That was three months ago? What was the communication? Internal communications. Well, here's so-and-so talked to so-and-so. You've got it all in one place and you can look and search it and pull it all up. In the current system, in the previous system we had, we didn't have that ability, we could potentially find something. We'd spend hours and hours and hours Was that an email? Was that a text? Was that a WhatsApp message or a Teams message? And you just didn't know where to look. And sometimes someone reaches out in Teams and the other person responds in text, and it's just a big mess. Right, this puts it all in one place, it organizes it for you, it gives you search options. It's just a really, really powerful tool for your communication solution.
Speaker 1You're a KPI guy, right. How has that improved the ability for you to make either portfolio or decisions in this process, or even oversee operations?
Speaker 2I am a metrics guy all day long and this is a hard one for me because most of the time I'll look at a product, someone will come to me and I'll say you know what?
Executive Buy-In & Implementation Strategy
Speaker 2are we doing that already, and does this make it better? Right? So if we're spending that money, can I spend it and get a better result? And that's an easy one. If I'm not spending money on that solution, then how does that impact my financial, right? That's always what I'm looking at. I want to know that's my scorecard.
Speaker 2This is so hard to see on how it impacts your financial, and that's where there's got to be a little bit of a leap of faith in there and go where are we at and what problems and how do we solve this faster? Right? How do we become more efficient? And that doesn't always show up in a KPI for solutions such as this, right. And so I think in general, we found in the first four months that we are more efficient, we're communicating better, we're not seeing as many problems and let's face it, I mean, I think anybody that's been in the industry will tell you a majority of the issues we run into are due to poor communication. They're not due to somebody not wanting to do their job or somebody being lazy. It's usually the ball got dropped somewhere along the line, someone didn't communicate properly, a message was missed, that type of thing, and those are the things that are hard to quantify in a KPI, right.
Speaker 2So if you're just eliminating those, anecdotally eliminating those problems, you don't have those issues popping up. That's a step in the right direction. And for Cinco, like I said, the people that were probably the most hesitant are the biggest champions at this point.
Speaker 1And that speaks volumes for us. Yeah, and I'm sure Jason has some reflection on that as he's talking to industry-wide executives around this challenge when you rolled it out and knowing that, just as humans, we want to do, like you mentioned, what's comfortable, what we're known to do, what gives us confidence, all that stuff, when you're making that move, that transition, how did you lead through that number one? And maybe Jason, you guys can banter back and forth on how you work together on that. And then, were there anything specific that the team noticed in the process where they started to have the ahas and they became the believers, right? That's what I'm curious about.
Speaker 2Yeah, I can start with that. We worked with Cinco closely and we first rolled it out just to the executive team Like play with it, find out how it works, figure out how you want to set up your threads, your individual chats, what groups you want to set up that type of stuff. So we put probably 60 days worth of thought just into the foundation and the structure, knowing that we weren't going to be 100% right, but the closer we could get to the way we wanted to be ultimately, the better off we'd be. So we've got everybody there and that was a big deal for us because that took some of the executive people that might've been hesitant and turned them into believers right away. So that when we did start to roll it out to our field personnel specifically our maintenance and our leasing people everybody had buy-in.
Speaker 3Not only did they have buy-in.
Speaker 2They had answers for the questions that came up because they had already asked those questions. They had already been through that and said what happens if, and they got those answers. And, like I said, the training piece for for cinco was fantastic. Aaron, who headed that up for us, was amazing. He's a really, really good guy and that made the whole process easier as well. But I think if we did it on a tiered approach, I think that was the key to having a successful change for us.
Speaker 3So I think Jim brings up a really important point here, because you know, I think where Jim and team were before is where a lot of people are, which is you just sort of have these organic processes that are like, yep, I know how to sort of get a message over to Jim or Melissa or what have you, and it just kind of grows up, it just happens right. And I think what we really saw in Jim's rollout was like this deeply thoughtful process where they weren't actually they weren't just thinking about Cinco, they were really rethinking their communication strategy, and I think that that's why they got such thinking about Cinco. They were really rethinking their communication strategy and I think that that's why they got such as Jim pointed out such a tremendous buy-in of like we're going to be thoughtful about how we want things to happen when incidents occur. And I think, maybe even going back to your ROI question for companies out there who are not as far along as where Anchor is in terms of centralization, I mean, people are putting millions of dollars worth of manpower over years into these centralization efforts and what's sort of amazing to us is like they're making huge organizational changes and then the part that's kind of not even being talked about is like, well, that team tends to use WhatsApp and this team tends to use Outlook and no one even talks about that, right, and then the rubber meets the road and they figure things out in not a thoughtful way, but just say here's kind of the organic way it happened, then it's kind of a mess.
Speaker 3So I think the thing that you know worked very well is that, you know this, the spirit of strategy development, the spirit of partnership, worked great between our two teams.
Speaker 3And, um, you know, I think the other thing that that Jim and team have really embraced is the fact that you know there's a double-edged sword to to working with a young company like us. We're certainly not Microsoft, right, but what the benefit of that is that this is a perpetual work in progress, like we're talking to the anchor team weekly, right, and we're working through, you know, feature requests and changes that they're looking for. That's how the product gets better. We only build this product for one audience, and so I think the folks who are coming onto the system now not only want to benefit from the collective wisdom of folks like Jim, but want to be part of shaping that future and say I have a vision about how this should work in the AI age of property management, in you know name any of the range of changes that are on the horizon, because they're all going to affect communication, all of them, and that's why we've put a, you know, real emphasis in terms of working with our clients to develop new features and functionality.
Speaker 1Hmm, interesting. Yeah, you know you may be evaluating those other initiatives and if you don't get the communication right, it may be that the steps that were taken in other initiatives may not even be an isolated, truthful assessment of what's working and what's not working.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, I think my biggest challenge as an executive, and what we spend a lot of time trying to communicate to our prospects, really is that I think that there's different types of technology, right, there's point solution technology out there that may improve a specific function, and then there's more broad-based, enabling technology which improves your ability to do other things, technology which improves your ability to do other things. And I think you know what we obviously like to avoid is a situation where someone's like well, you know, I've got the AI initiative, I've got the Yardi upgrade, I've got this, I've got that, I've got that and I've got you. And where do I put you in that group? And I think you know and fortunately, thanks to you know wonderful clients like, like Jim, you know they will tell others like it would be very hard to go back to the old way and do anything difficult, right, I mean, I'm I'm a Cinco user myself.
Speaker 3If somebody said to me go out and do X, where X is something hard moving offices, changing your branding, implementing a new system, anything right, and I had to go back to some mix of email and text message and WhatsApp, like that would be awful, right, I mean, I would do it three times slower, right? So you know, we've used Synco as this kind of enabling technology which makes all other efforts easier to do, and I think that's you know, that's the message we're trying to get out, and I'm glad to see Tim shaking his head in agreement.
Speaker 2Yeah, no, it's great. And when you say that, Jason, it reminds me a little bit of what we did before. We had PMS software, right, we still ran our business, we still managed everything. Everything was paper files, everything was done. Could you imagine going back to that and trying to do that again without your PMS software? And again, when you talk about ROI, it's hard to look at your PMS software and say where does that show up on my financial right?
Speaker 3It's my biggest expense.
Speaker 2It's everybody's biggest software expense, right, but it's hard to measure and this is one of those things that at some point people are going to go. What did we do before there was Senco? How did we manage to keep all our communications there? Right, and I think it's like I said, I really appreciate the solution and we're big fans.
Speaker 1Yeah, is there anything more you can share about the? I mean, you mentioned your. Your executive team rolled it out. But like, specifically, I know people are thinking, listening to this, thinking like how would they go about it? I know your portfolio may be different than others, some are smaller, some are larger, some are third party and all of that stuff. Like, how would you be thinking about this if you're outside of your organization and you're, you know, you've already, you've already sometimes, when we we can appreciate what we understand when we do it, versus observing it, and so, like knowing what you've observed, what advice would you give to others thinking through this?
Real-Time Integration & Future Innovations
Speaker 2thinking through this. I think a couple of things. One is just you know, obviously and I think most people have this a good grip on what you're doing now, like what happens and where are we at with our communication strategy now, like just a self-assessment, that's honest, and is this really working for us or not? Right, and then you look at that and you go is this an improvement? How much of an improvement? How is this going to help us? And then, if so, how do I then what's the best way to roll it out? So with us, because we're centralized, we won't roll a software out on one or two properties. If we're rolling it out, it is the entire portfolio. That's just the way we operate. Right, we have a very homogenous tech stack and it works across the entire portfolio and we couldn't do just single properties in most instances. I should say I think if I am a larger operator and I still have onsite staff and that type of stuff, I think it makes sense to be able to roll it out to a property or two properties, staff and that type of stuff. I think it makes sense to be able to roll it out to a property or two properties and get it going on those properties as well as the administrative team and the executive team, and they need to be on it. And the great thing is for us is I don't have to be actively involved in a conversation to pop in and see what's going on and then make decisions elsewhere based on that information.
Speaker 2Last night my Cinco went off at 1030 at night and I looked and our garage door was broken on one of our properties. But I watched that communication for about 45 minutes. I know it's 1030 at night, it's a problem, but that's what I do and make sure it was all under control. I didn't have to say a word, but I could see all the steps they were taking. All the communication was going back and forth and it was fine. I left alone. If they had gone awry, had gone sideways, had done something wrong, then I could have popped in and said hey, by the way, we need to blast the tenants, let them know to get their cars out during the event, so to speak.
Speaker 3So a key difference between Cinco and email is that on email, the person who's initiating the email is the one deciding whose inbox it goes into, which is so messed up if you think about the world that we live in. Right, like, they usually are going to get it wrong, they're going to not guess right. And so in the world prior to Cinco, in the world of email, there's always someone saying well, where are we on that? Because they didn't know about that other email, because they weren't CC'd right, or they were CC'd on a whole bunch of the wrong emails and it was bearing in their inbox. And with Cinco, what happens is Jim, as COO, has visibility into all the different teams and what they're doing, but Jim gets to decide what nature of messages should actually notify him at 1030, right? So easier, obviously, to show in a demo, and I'm always it's my favorite thing to do is give a demo of Cinco, so I was happy to do that, but it really provides a sense of transparency that didn't exist before, I think.
Speaker 3The other thing that I would mention is and I don't know if Jim and team are actively using this, this feature, as much as others, but like we try to come up with instant delight type of features. So, for example, one of the most popular features that we have is real-time translation, and this has been really especially effective with field teams, where you have folks who can speak or type in any language they want and it is translated in real time and lands in the inbox in the language of the recipient. And what we found is that's the type of thing where, when you're trying to get that organizational change to be able to say to someone who may be low-tech or tech-phobic or what have you, you don't have to type, you don't even have to, you can just speak. And not only that, you can speak in your native tongue and know that the other person's going to get the message and that you can be as verbose as you'd like and you don't have to try to speak English as a second language. Like that was a huge unlock, one of several, but we try to mix those things in to make that kind of rollout more seamless.
Speaker 3But, like Jim said, there are some companies that have rolled out with us and they've started out with a region and executive team and then expanded beyond that over time. I think Jim was very, very thoughtful in the process, where he was definitely a measure three times cut. Once, you know, we met several times with his team, going over it again and again to make sure that we got everything configured right. The team really became experts in it and then they engaged in a really effective train, the trainer process, which you know. We're now taking a. You know, taking a page from that playbook and using that for other new clients.
Speaker 1That's good. You know, I start to think about these off the shelf solutions that people are most everybody is using right now. Right, and you developed this specific tool for our suite of tools here for enabling many other things that they may be working on in their business. How has the collaboration gone in terms of making the product better? I imagine, Jason, you're on a roadmap of continuous innovation and progress. What's that been like in terms of working with customers and building with them as much as showing them what you've built?
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, I've actually I've really appreciated and I'll say that that comes from a place of deep experience. So my previous company was more of a passive product, meaning like when something was catastrophically wrong we would alert people about it and that was the core of the product and even though it's evolved over time, like 90% of the value while I was there was driven from that core right. So we kind of had a sense of like here's what we need to build. But with Synco being one of the four icons in the bottom of their screen, like the level of scrutiny, the level of engagement, the level of feedback that we get is unbelievable. I mean, I have a list of 100 fantastic ideas that you know. Every month we me and my team sit there and be like how do we prioritize which of these great ideas we're going to do next there, and be like how do we prioritize which of these great ideas we're going to do next? And you know so we've.
Speaker 3Really my product team's job is when we start hearing about things. We, you know. We then go back to our clients like Jim and pressure, test them and really try to get at what is the underlying issue. There we come up with multiple approaches, we show them screenshots. The underlying issue there we come up with multiple approaches, we show them screenshots, so we really develop in concert with our clients. Which when was the last time Microsoft showed up at your door and said, hey, how can we really improve Teams? Obviously, that's just not how they operate, because they're operating from a much wider, broader audience and I think the folks who are coming on to the platform like that type of engagement and I think it certainly makes our product. It gives us an unfair advantage in the market.
Speaker 2Yeah, I can contribute to that a little bit that they have been great in terms of listening to feedback. The product we have today is fantastic the way it stands, but the exciting part is they continue to improve it for us and they look at our specific feedback and what our specific needs are and they're building for that and that is worth its weight in gold. And, like to Jason's point, Microsoft's not doing that Teams, you know they don't care what we think or how our product works, and these guys have been great about that. So, yeah, no, I appreciate that quite a bit. We have a saying here If it didn't happen, if it's not in Synco, it didn't happen. So we're trying to get everything we do, all our communication, even our documents. When someone emails us documents outside of Synco, we bring them into the conversation they're germane to, and so we've got everything right there ready to go at any point in time.
Speaker 3So we've spent a lot of time on not just like deep integrations with Yardi and the other big systems, but with let's call it out of the box, light touch integration with all the other software that's out there, and Jim alluded to that. When we were talking with clients and we asked them, well, what's the nature of the 300 emails in your inbox? And a big chunk of what they talked about was actually output from other systems. Well, I bought this boiler notification system. It's constantly sending me alerts. Or I bought this security system and it's constantly sending this or that type of stuff.
Speaker 3And so one of the features that we built is the ability to pipe those emails directly into Synco to the right groups with the right notifications and filing, so that all of these other systems they actually get more valuable as you bring them in. And whether it's a system or, to Jim's point, someone emails you something, you can forward that right into Synco and then start collaborating immediately with the team. But like none of those features were there on version one, they only came from feedback from clients saying, hey, you know I'm using Synco, but how do I get this email in here? So it's been. It's very fortunate in that we have people who are very engaged with the product.
Rethinking Communication Strategy & Closing Thoughts
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, I really like what you said. You guys Both of you aligned on this as the stepping back a little bit and thinking through your communication strategy. You know, I know there's more to each company and they probably should just jump on a call with you, jason, and figure it out for them, because every company has their unique investment objectives, priorities, all of those things, and it's one that encourages more deeper thought or deeper conversation. I know what I wanted to do here was really support the initiative. See, you know, technology moving so fast it's changing other parts of the business and, to the notification system you just described, it's making it more of a challenge, you know, with all these different tools and point solutions coming into our systems and communications. I think it was Dr George Westerman who said that technology moves fast because it can be programmed and it typically does what we tell it to do in programs, whereas companies move slowly because there's people involved and there's fears and there's uncertainty and there's levels of comfort and there's past success, and all of that needs to be dealt with in terms of how you innovate and create value, moving forward, and this idea and the series that we're up with for 2025 here is this change I wouldn't even say change of management, I would just say it's transformation of how we rethink creating value for companies and multifamily, and this is obviously a topic that we wanted to explore.
Speaker 1For those of you that are listening, I encourage you to reach out to Jason and ask him. I've got a great team to share what they can do for you for your reasons. But that's up to you to decide and figure out and prioritize. I like the idea of what you said around rethinking your communication strategy. Ultimately, even if you're doing other things, this is the enabler of all of it. All of it and you know, just kind of putting a bow tie on that is. Are there any other final things you guys want to share with our time together today? Just because we're coming up and I know we'll have you back, we'll talk more about other things. I think that, jason, you have a passion for the organizational change. I know, jim, you're getting it done together. There'll be more to discuss, but for today, any other final thoughts you want to leave our listeners with and I'll go with you Jim, first, and then we'll let Jason wrap it up.
Speaker 2You know, I think well for anybody that's listening to this now and they're not a member of the Multifamily Innovation Council get on there.
Speaker 2It's a great outlet and a shameless plug for you, patrick, but I'm telling you, I get more out of those Friday meetings and learn about these types of products and these types of solutions and how we use them than probably any other group that I'm a member of, so it's a fantastic option. Secondly, in terms of Cinco, they're probably one of the best vendors we've worked with in terms of being able to work with us on our specific needs and really trying to understand what issues, what we were trying to solve and what would be best for us. And, given that we're a little bit different in our structure than everybody else, they were willing to come and meet us where we were and provide a solution that worked for us and, like I said, we don't see that very often from our vendors. They want that one-size-fits-all, and these guys have been great to deal with.
Speaker 1That's awesome, jason, any.
Speaker 3Yeah, look, I would say first of all mirror Jim's enthusiastic support of the council. It's been great, not only the calls, but the in-person event was just one of the council. It's been great both. Not only the calls but the in-person event was just one of the best I've ever been to and it's been great to meet so many talented folks out there.
Speaker 3I would say sort of two things. Number one you know Jim and I have become, have gone from a cold call many months ago to friends and you know I wish that the world were as open-minded as Jim. I mean, I reached out earnestly because I was so kind of intrigued by his LinkedIn profile of being a centralization master and like, yeah, he was like happy to jump on the phone and share some thoughts. So then, you know, showed him what we're working on. He had some great thoughts and just sort of blossomed from there. So open-mindedness is a wonderful quality and I encourage people to stay curious, I think you know.
Speaker 3The second thing that I would say about Cinco, but generally about the world, is when people think about new software initiatives, oftentimes they're stuck in the like.
Speaker 3I remember when I implemented Yardi, right and like what that felt like.
Speaker 3And now, as you know, patrick, when you know, in the age of AI, right, where it's like you think of something and 18 seconds later you have a work product that you could have never dreamed of, right, and similarly, I think Synco is always 100 times easier than people imagine it to be and people actually like using it because they're coming from a place of pain and it's a pain that has been creeping and sustained for so long that they don't realize they're in the boiling pot. It's only once that you show them what communication could be like that they say oh, this is actually much more pleasant and this is culture building and it makes my job easier and it et cetera, et cetera. But you know, we train people and they are using it 15 minutes later. It's not like a Yardi implementation. So you know, I thank you for the, for the shout out. I encourage, you know, anyone who wants to chat with me to to reach out with me. I'm sure we'll put in the comments, but team Cinco S-Y-N-C-Ocom.
Speaker 1I love it. I love it and thank you for the good wishes there. I mean, we love having you guys, and your contribution to the council is what makes it really special, and I like what you said, jason, about show them what's possible. Out here in Scottsdale and even the Phoenix Valley, we have Waymo the self. You know driving vehicles and you know I was in an Uber and we were in a destination from one spot to the other and halfway through the destination, you know, the driver started getting erratic and you know, looking back, I realized that he was racing to get our ride done so we could get to the next and pick up the next ride. So the incentives were a little misaligned, you know, and so that encouraged us. There was enough pain there to go like, wow, that was crazy. We saw Waymo drive by and I went and got the app and, uh, it was super easy, and and uh and isn't it amazing how fast you get comfortable with something like that.
Speaker 1Yeah, but you know, what was funny is when I um opened the app, it said the most um experienced driver is on the way, like uh, it was. It was almost like, yeah, you know what they. They have driven. Uh, you know more than me because the thing is doing miles and miles. But you have to just experience it to appreciate it and I would imagine you probably have those benefits as well where you can get people on a call. I've seen it up close.
Speaker 1So I do encourage anything that's going to help organizations move productively through change, because there's the status quo Keep doing what you're doing Linear, and you're going to get outpaced by the competition. Or there's radical change where you're ripping things out, and that's never good. You're leaving people behind. But being able to productively move through change in a way that is helpful for the business and employees and all that stuff, I mean we're all in for that. So keep us updated. I would love to jump on with more people making bold moves and making businesses better, and that's the purpose of what we're doing here. So I appreciate you guys jumping on to do that. We'll let you get back to work and we'll put in the show notes ways that you guys can reach out to both of these guys and hopefully not flood their uh appointments, but uh, make it useful for you guys and what you're working on. So with that, uh we'll wrap and uh we'll see you in the next one.
