Stop Selling Services And Start Making Money - with Kyle Renz

We map a practical path to growth by pairing automated five-star reviews with bold, outcome-driven offers that reach the 80 percent of landlords who never search for property management. We explain how to fix foundations, craft guarantees, and turn skeptics into loyal clients.

• why reviews drive rankings and trust
• automation triggers for move-in and maintenance
• private channels to deflect one-star escalations
• demand capture versus demand generation
• the 80 percent DIY landlord opportunity
• outcome-led messaging over service lists
• specific, time-bound guarantees that convert
• marketing house: website, GBP, citations
• case studies and calculators that prove value
• retention by selling outcomes, not price

If you do want to reach out to Kyle, hit his website at BlueDoorTheory.com or follow him at Kyle Renz on LinkedIn

This is the 2026 ONYX Retreat advertisement

visit pmsuccess.com for more value packed property management related information or to hire Tony as your property management coach.

Transcript

Setting The Stage: Growth And Operations

Tony Cline 0:00

Welcome to the Property Management Success Podcast, where we interview leaders in the industry to uncover the secrets to profitability, efficiency, and achieving true freedom, whether it's your time, money, or lifestyle. I'm your host, Tony Klein, and I'm here to help you build a wildly successful property management business. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of the Property Management Success Podcast. Really excited. Today I have Kyle Renz with Blue Door Theory on. Kyle, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Tony, it's so good to be here, man. Thanks for having me on.

Kyle’s Path From Engineering To PM Marketing

Tony Cline 0:33

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the areas that I'm hearing a lot about and from our coaching clients is and even the people that come to us, they talk about two things. They talk about how do I make my operations better so that I can pull myself out of the day-to-day. And then how do I actually grow the company? Because just through attrition, you have to grow just to stay even. And the market is changing, technology is changing. And so I really wanted to have you come on and give a little bit of your background of what you do and how you come into the space and then what you offer to the space. So that's what we're going to kind of talk about today. But let's give the listeners a little bit of your background and how you got into focusing on what we're going to talk about here for the property management single family rental space.

The Review Problem In Property Management

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, sure. So I'm the founder of Blue Door Theory, bluedoor theory.com. And we can talk a little bit more about what that lead generation offer actually does for the property management space. It's specifically focused on SFR PMCs. And I'll, but I'll get into what that's all about and how I got there. So for the most part, I think that I'm I'm not going to try to pretend that I'm not that I'm well known in the property management space. If you've heard of me or you've seen me, it's probably because you've received a cold email from me at one point in time about one of our marketing offers. So that's how I actually got into this whole world of marketing to begin with. So I was in the engineering world and low voltage, kind of like Peter Lohman, I think, right? I think he was in the low voltage engineering space. So was working on there, wanted to have something different, started to look into go-to market strategies. I've always been interested in marketing just because of the human psychology that is involved. Of course, marketing is always going to be deeply involved in human psychology. So worked with a number of clients, really in the B2B space, helping them with cold email strategies just to generate more business. So that's where we start with lead generation. Working with a couple of clients, and then one of them comes to me and says, Hey, we're doing really well on booking calls from the cold email services, but we're having trouble closing deals. Like, all right, well, that's that's a big problem. You don't want to pay for any kind of lead gen service if you can't actually close. So they brought me in to really look at what was going on in the sales process. Ended up getting a lot more involved there, took a wrecking ball to the entire offer and to the sales process. And within a short amount of time, we grew the company by 6x. So that was a big success. I have since stepped down from that role of head of sales and strategy because I wanted to really start my own thing, because I wanted to dive deeper into property management marketing. Because during that time, when I came into this company, the main thing we did was peel back the onion layers to say, well, let's look at your portfolio of current clients. Who you who are you having great success with? And I found property management companies was who they were talking to the most and having really good success with. So I said, okay, let's just be done with anything else. Let's just focus on this space and really provide value to these people. Because the main thing that we were doing for the property management world in that area was helping them with their online reviews. So that's where you probably received a cold email from me to say, hey, saw your 3.6 star rating. How's that affecting your business? And this is a big deal for property management companies because they get dunked on all the time by the tenants, right? You know, they cause some kind of major disruption. They don't get their, uh they don't get their security deposit back, despite the fact that they put 10 holes in the wall and somehow a toilet's missing and they are, you know, going to leave you a one-star flame because they didn't get their full security deposit back. So in the property management world, it's really tough to get those five-star reviews and to dodge the one stars. So a lot of that does come down to operations, but for the most part, people don't have the motivation to go leave a five-star review. They do have a lot of emotional fuel to leave a one-star.

Tony Cline 4:32

All right.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

So that's, you know, long story short, what we saw was that we could really help these people if we just understood this space. So I took that team and I just said, let's just lock in for a month and let's just see and learn everything that we can about the property management world. And I found it to be fascinating once I got in there. So we learned all about the property management software. I think I could probably sell App Folio and Rent Manager at this point in time because we had to create integration hooks with all those different companies to make the product really valuable and effective and to automate everything because people don't have time to go chase reviews. Okay. So that was really great. And I jumped in and I just instantly loved it. I haven't met one property management owner that I didn't like. And I'm I'm saying that sincerely. I've met plenty of other owners in other spaces that are not nearly as fun to work with, they're not as grounded. And I think if you're dealing with people from all the different spectrums out there, right? You're dealing with really wealthy people that own all these properties. And then you're dealing with people that are going to get evicted, right? So you're on you're across every part of the human experience. And you've got to deal with all those things to be able to speak to all those people in a way that, you know, I find most people want to be really reputable and they want to be kind. They want to do things the right way. So I really like working with property managers because I find them to be a very grounded group of people just laid back and hardworking, right? It's just you can't skate by, you can't phone it in and property management and be successful. So that's one of the things that I really like about this space.

Automating Reviews And Blocking One‑Stars

Tony Cline 6:04

So so we started with we started with some email marketing, you got dialed in, you figured that out, you've you've got some skills with email marketing, then you start moving into helping people generate the five-star reviews. And and I can tell you just from seeing in the background of hundreds of property management companies at this point, your reviews matter. Your reviews matter for for where you rank, but also for what people think about you when you're online. Dialed in there, so we've got the the email marketing that you've got that experience. Then we brought that over to five-star reviews. What do you see? Why do you think that that five-star review matters? I mean, like I said, I I know from my own experience it does, but what do you see the impact of focusing on those? What do you see that impacting the business?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Well, just like you said, if somebody's gonna show up, all right. So say that you're a self-managed landlord and you finally get to the point where you're having to go through an eviction, it's very costly, you're done, right? You're you finally say, I'm I'm through with this. I just had a friend recently here in Atlanta where I'm based who had to go through a huge mold problem in a bathroom in a property that he was managing himself. And he just said, Man, forget this. I need to go find a property management company. I'm so tired of dealing with these things. And so that's what he did. He went and he just went on Google, he typed in best property management company near me. He found the top three in the three-pack, and those are typically ranked because of reviews. He didn't look anywhere else, he just looked at the review part and uh he made a call to all three of those companies that were in the top three in Atlanta, and then he he picked one that he liked the best that he vibed with the most, right? That's what it came down to. So you got to think about reviews, and this is really on the demand capture side. So I this is the main thing I want to get into is that people should not just be focused on their reviews and focused on their website and all the demand capture side to catch those landlord owners when they get to that place that my friend did. Because I'm gonna talk about another friend here in a second that is the polar opposite of what he has going on. So if your reviews are set up right, if you have the right optimization, if you do have the right SEO, you're gonna capture those leads as they come through because there's so much noise out there. There's a ton of property management companies at this point. I have personally analyzed uh 600 property management websites, Google Business profiles, and their reviews. So say a prayer for me going through all that. But that's taught me a ton about this space and what's going on to show me the gaps. But there's so much out there, so much noise that when you have something really powerful like reviews, which really has to be at the top of your list for any local service business, because that's how people shop these days. It's how they cut through the noise. People just trust reviews as much as they do word of mouth referrals. That's just the psychology now.

Tony Cline 8:53

So we're in agreement. Reviews matter. I've worked with a lot of companies, though, when you start talking to them about getting reviews, their team doesn't know how to reach out or when to reach out or who to reach out to because frankly, just a lot of them say, I don't know if we'd get a good review or not. They do their systems aren't dialed in and there's things that we need to work on on the back end. But aside from getting them to where they say, I'm confident in reaching out to my clients to get those reviews, how do you see systemizing that or making it so that because you it's one thing to tell your team, hey, we got to get some reviews, it's another thing to actually go about being able to get those. So what what do you see happening in the space where you're seeing success with that? Because again, as a business owner, I want to get as many reviews as possible. But if I'm on a team that isn't sure that that team is providing good service across the board, and I'm the one that's tasked with asking for those reviews, that's a lot of pressure on me. And it's just easier for me to not do it unless I've got a system and I know when to ask and I know how to ask. So what are you seeing as as far as that part of the process?

Follow‑Ups That Convert Good Intentions

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Yeah, you've got to be asking for reviews constantly, no matter where you are in your process with operations. If things are super bad, then yes, I think that you're probably gonna need to improve on your operations. But the the core thing is automating the entire process. So the strategy that I implemented when we got in there, because the company I was working at, they had a decent strategy going on. But once we dove into the property management space and peeled back the onion layers, we said, okay, there's ways to automate this. They're gonna just make this absolutely crush. So the strategies that I developed ended up stacking 27,000 five-star reviews for our property in the property management space alone, 27,000 five-star reviews across our clients. We blocked over 5,000 one-star reviews, because that's a crucial aspect to this that a lot of people forget about. But the main thing is you just have to automate it and you have to have a real strategy. And most people are really busy, most property management companies are super busy. They've wearing 10 different hats. And so chasing reviews for 15 hours a week, which is essentially what it takes because you have to follow up all the time, becomes a really tedious process. So, what we did is just create a strategy whereby you're automating the entire process to go ask for reviews at strategic moments when people are thinking most positively about their life and about your company, right? So when somebody goes to a moves in to a new property, you can have a trigger event because most of the time people create work orders because they have to complete the move in. The minute that that work order gets closed for the move in, the person gets a text message and an email so that they will go be prompted then to go leave a review. And if they had a negative experience, you give them the avenue to let you know what happened so that you can make it right. That's the way that you frame it. So the copywriting on that has to be really precise to redirect any kind of negative feedback into a private channel. That's how we block 5,000 one-star reviews over the last few years. So you have to think, you have to ask for the review because no one wakes up in the morning, has their cup of coffee, and says, you know what I'm gonna do today? I've got 10,000 things to do. Let me leave a five-star for my property management. No one has ever said this. So if you're not asking for the review, you're not gonna get it. What happens then? The one-star army then takes over the narrative about your business because they're the only ones that had the emotional fuel to get online and go leave the review. But they're doing that as an escalation path. It's a ticketing system for them because something has gone wrong and they want to get your attention. So if you if you can get in front of them before they get all hot and bothered, then you can go and send them to a private channel to leave their negative feedback for you elsewhere. That's that's kind of how that goes. So a move in is a great time to ask. Fulfillment of a maintenance request. You fix somebody's dishwasher. I've got three kids, my dishwasher goes down, life is chaos, right? So if you came out and fixed my dishwasher, I'm gonna love you for it. Ask me for a review within 24 to 48 hours, preferably within 24, and then follow up with me two times after you ask that initial, ask initially. Okay. I want to touch on that.

Tony Cline 14:47

I want to touch on that because that's super important. One of the things that we found through going through this process and trying to put in a system to ask for these reviews, people will say, Well, I asked them for a review and they didn't get it. And I'm guilty of this myself. I I've got I've got service providers that they gave me five-star service. And then they even asked me to give them a five-star review if I was satisfied with the service. And I even committed to them that, oh yeah, this is great. Let me just get back home and I'll I'll take care of it. And it gets added to my list. I have really good intentions, but we just had the systems conference out in Las Vegas, and I was renting a couple of uh three 15 passenger vans to take people on this hike before the conference started. The guy did an excellent job, and we we told him all three of our drivers were gonna give him the five-star reviews when we got back just because of the way they took care of us. Sure. And I swear to you, it's on my list, but I have not done it yet because it's not to the top of the list yet. It's not my priority, it's his priority to get that five-star review. So you can't just ask the one time. So, what are you doing for those people that are willing, just like me, but yet didn't move it to the top of the list? Are you going back time after time? Are you asking the same way? Are you asking different? How are you structuring that to be able to get people like me to actually get off the fence?

Demand Capture Vs Demand Generation

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Let's talk about metrics real quick. So, most property management companies tap into about 0.1 to 0.01% of their total review pool to actually leave reviews every single month. So it's abysmal. With a system like ours, you're tapping into anywhere from two to five, sometimes eight percent of your potential review pool, which should be your landlords, your vendors, your vendors better be leaving you some five-star reviews, but they're not gonna do it unless you make it super easy for them to do so. And then the the renters, that's your biggest pull, is the renters. So you've got to be talking to them in context, especially for the renters. So if it's a move in, the copywriting should say, how was your move in? That just gives them that much more of a boost to make that happen. But not everybody's gonna respond. So that's why you have to have it on a campaign. So you ask that first time. If you're gonna do this manually, think about what this takes. You got to have a spreadsheet, you got to do an export from App Folio of all the people that moved in that day, because you cannot wait more than 24 hours. All right. So you got to have that, and then you got to send out the review request with a text message and an email. Because Tony, why are you not leaving this guy a review? Because it's not fun. You don't get anything out of it except for to feel like a nice person for all of three seconds. So you're not getting a dopamine hit. You have it's it's you have no incentive, and it's a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt to remember, okay, open up the app, and then I've got to go, especially in the property management space, I've got to go find their Google Business profile. Maybe you get the wrong one. So you've got to do all this work. Nobody wants to do that work for you. So you have to ask for the review, you have to ask, or no one's gonna do it. You have to make it so super easy for them to leave the review, or it's not gonna happen. And then you've got to give them an avenue to uh voice their negative complaints in a private channel, or those one stars are gonna end up on your page and it's gonna hurt your reputation. And your reputation's everything. Because at some point in time, when somebody's in your funnel and your marketing funnel, they're gonna look at your reviews. They have word of mouth, great, I'm still gonna go look at your reviews because it's so ingrained in our culture now to do it. So it is a really important aspect. It's just not the most important thing that a property management company can do for marketing.

Tony Cline 18:33

Okay, so you said this is this is one strategy that you think is important, but it's not the most important, or there's something else that is more important. So let's transition to that. Let's talk a little bit about how you see companies growing in the property management space and what do you see as being something that's more important than managing the the reviews and putting that on autopilot and getting that running. Yeah. Now we have that up and running. What what else? What's next? Right.

The Marketing House: Fix The Foundation

SPEAKER_00 19:00

So 99% of what property management companies do is on one side of the marketing coin. And there's so there's two sides of it. You've got demand capture and you've got demand generation. So 99% of everything that property management companies do for their marketing, and this goes for 99.999% of all property management companies. And again, I feel like I had the authority to say this because I've, you know, I've had my eyes glued to the screen looking at 600 of these websites and Google profiles. And I have not seen anything that resembles a solid demand generation offer that's out there. So demand capture, there's so much confusion about marketing because it is so deeply entwined with human psychology. And most people are so busy having to run their business that they don't have time to become an obsessive expert about what marketing looks like and how people's minds work and what offers actually work and won't, what don't. And so a lot of confusion gets put out into the ether and people start to scramble and they start to just grab anything and everything that they hear. Okay. So I'm going to give you a prime example of this. One of our other offers that we do is an occupancy maximization engine that we've built in the multifamily space. So if you're running a class B, class C property and you've got vacancy issues, we can help you to get in front of those prospects where they start their journey, right? So I'm talking to one of my one of my prospects that I believe I just got off a sales call with him. And we're having a sales call last week. So the our first one that we jump on. And he says, I've got to, I got to start writing blogs. I just got this email and it's it's from apartments.com or something like that. The importance of writing blogs. Can you write blogs for me? How much is that gonna cost? It's gonna cost a lot, man. And I could take money from you and try to convince you that you need a blog, but that is so think about what is that gonna do? What lever are you gonna pull to get more customers to fill vacancies with a blog? Are you really telling me the guy that's renting out a$750 a month one-bedroom studio in a class C apartment is gonna go read your blog? Is that really gonna drive the needle for him? No. He's going to Facebook Marketplace. That's where he starts, or he's going to Craigslist. So if you're not there, you're missing out. The next step that they take is your Google Business Profile. Right now they're non-existent or they're broken or they're not optimized. In this one case, it's been suspended. So we have to start there with your marketing foundation, right? If we start with your foundation, then you can work up, work your way up to doing top-level marketing like a blog. Okay. So I like to think about marketing in terms of a house. I'm going to get back to the coin analogy in a second, but think about your house first. This is the demand capture side. When people are searching for best property management near me. Like my friend who had the mold problem, he got online, he said, I finally had enough. And then the first thing he did, best property management company near me. You've got to be ranking for that if you're going to capture those people. But that's 20% of your market. 80% of the rental properties in the United States and Canada, 80% of them are self-managed. So you've got to be thinking about how do I get in touch with these people? All right. So that's the demand generation side. I'm going to go back to the marketing house and the other side of the coin for demand capture. So if you're going to be building up your marketing, you have to start on your foundation first. So that's going to be your website, of course. You got to have a website so that people know who you are and you've got a phone number. But then you've got to have a Google business profile that's optimized. You got to have your reviews going. You've got to have citations built out across the directory listings. That's a little bit more technical. I don't want to get too far down the road on that. And you got to have some solid Google business profile posts, maybe a few social media posts going on, but nothing crazy. The posts are on the other side, but the other things I talked about, that's your foundation. When you have that foundation built, then you can go start doing top-level stuff on your attic or you're going to build like a$30,000 kitchen. You're not going to build that kitchen on a sinkhole, right? So if your foundation is broken, broken, the other stuff that you're building is not going to work. The best way to think about this is let's say that you're a property management company with a 2.5 star rating and you've got nine reviews, and then you're running local service ads. You are lighting money on fire every single month. Because what happens? Somebody types in the best property management company near me. The local service ads get brought up to the top, and act they cost more money when your reviews stink because Google has to pull you up from the dregs. They have to pull your ranking up so high. And the effort to pull you up is money. That's what that is. And then they see your star rating and then they say, uh, right? That's what people do. And they see a low star rating. Eh, I don't want to do this. And then they go to see the top three who are not spending anything on ads, and they're over there crushing it. So you just congratulations, you just spent ad money to give your top competitor yet one more client. That's what that looks like. So this is where I'm talking about marketing foundation. You have to have your foundation built first, which does not cost nearly as much as running ads, right? So you can automate your reviews for less than$500 a month very easily, less than that, less than$300 a month. You can automate your reviews. And then you can start building to make that logical decision to go to the next level. All right. So blogs are going to be at the top. Technical SEO is going to be at the top. All these really expensive things, you better have your foundation built first. All right. So that's what we're going to stress on the demand capture side of the aisle. So reviews, they they all work on that demand capture. People searching for property management. People spend tons of money on an awesome website. They spend tons of money on SEO, but you're only capturing that 20% of the people that are actually searching for the best property management company near me. What's what's going on with the rest of the world? All right. So here's my other anecdote, if you will. One of my son's best friend, his dad owns four properties in the Atlanta area. He also owns this big Dodge Ram work van that he keeps all of his tools in to go service all of those houses. He's got three kids, and he is constantly running around fixing up his self-managed properties. And I just wanted to have like, brother, what's going on here? Why are you doing this? You're just burn yourself, burn burn the candle at both ends. You've got a day job. You're doing so much stuff. Why don't you get a hire a property management company to handle this for you? He just looks me dead in the eye and says, that's a total scam. All right. It's it's worthless. I can do everything that those people can do, and I can do it for less. But Tony, you and I both know, because we've looked at the data, most the the average self-managed landlord is losing in between 20 or 10 and$20,000 per year per property because of inefficiencies that they have in their operations. So they're underpriced on rent. Their vacancies are going uh too long, right? They they two months of a vacancy, how much is that going to cost you? They don't have leverage with a vendor network. So they're paying more for any kind of repairs that they have going on. They've got the opportunity cost of having to deal with everything. They've got the legal stuff that they're exposed to if they have to go through an eviction. There's there's so many minefields out here that they have no idea that they're even losing this money. So this equates to over a billion dollars in the United States alone that's just being lit on fire because of inefficiencies and self-managed DIY landlords not knowing what to do. That is that's a crime, right? I would say that's a crime. That's such a misallocation of wealth. So everybody could be doing better in the world if these guys were probably properly propagandized to. All right. They just have not had, they've just not had the right message sent to them. They don't know that they're losing this money because people are afraid to talk about money.

The 80 Percent DIY Landlord Blind Spot

Tony Cline 26:59

The way you structure that, I think, is people who are managing, they don't call themselves self-managing landlords, by the way. We're the only ones that call them that. Right. They are just landlords because they're the center of their own universe. They're not going to call themselves I self-manage. So, first of all, as our friend Pablo says, you need to enter the conversation that's already happening in somebody's head. You can't start a conversation with somebody. You enter a conversation that's already happening in their head. And so one of the things I think we need to do is a lot of these people that you just mentioned, the people that are lighting money on fire, they are unaware that they have a problem.

unknown 27:34

Correct.

Tony Cline 27:34

So first you have to make them problem aware. Then once you make them problem aware, you have to make them solution aware that there is a solution to their problem. And then lastly, you make them aware that you are the solution that they're looking for. And so if you go through those three steps or those three phases, I think you can you can convert some of those, quote, self-managing landlords into paying clients. And so I think that's where you're leading when you talk about being propagandized to giving them information that that we're sharing with them that their initial position, the initial conversation that's happening in their head is wrong. And so, how do we do that? How do you go about entering into their their conversation already happening in their head? How do we go about giving them that propaganda to quote convert them? I'm uh I'm assuming that's where we're leading in the conversation, which is let's actually go after those people who don't even know that they have a problem.

Propaganda Done Right: Lead With Outcomes

SPEAKER_00 28:37

If you go after those people the right way, you'll capture the other 20% that are already looking and already sold on the the idea that they need property management services. That's that's kind of my whole philosophy. It's that's the backbone behind blue door theory. And blue door theory, the blue, and that means there's a big blue ocean of, and I know that they don't call themselves this, but we would call self-managed landlords that are hemorrhaging money. They need to know. I I would almost say there's a moral obligation to let them know. And propaganda is a in most people's mind, it's a dirty word, right? So I'm saying that to be provocative here. I'm gonna go back to explain this. A lot of people struggle with marketing because they have this negative association in their mind, because there's a ton of exploitative, negative marketing out there, like making beauty standards, for instance. You got to go buy the next wrinkle cream so that you can be beautiful. And if you don't, then you're worthless. Like people understand this and say, uh, I'm kind of revulsed by that. That's B2C, that's business to consumer marketing. And a lot of it is rife with some exploitative, gross stuff that I personally am grossed out by. Um, and I'm sure a lot of people are. When you're talking about B2B, business-to-business marketing, which self-managed landlords are that, it's kind of a weird hybrid world because they're technically consumers. So you can't go cold email them or you're going to be violating the Can Spam Act. You don't want to do that, trust me. But you can get in front of them to talk to them as if they were business owners and talk to them on this level about the money that they are losing. So when I say propaganda, it's about giving them useful information to help them along the way, right? So when we discovered germ theory as a civilization, people said, Oh my gosh, we all got to wash our hands. But so many people didn't understand this. So there was a mass propaganda campaign to convince people to wash their hands. We still do it. You go into any bathroom, wash your hand. Don't forget, during COVID, golly, it was all over the place. We had mass propaganda campaigns to get people to quit smoking cigarettes. Right. So there are good levels to this that are actually beneficial for people. So that's what we mean when we're talking about it's just the word to use when we're thinking about it this way. All right. So in marketing, you're just convincing people to do something that they wouldn't normally do. All right. And the hardest thing in business, 100%, is getting people to get on the phone with you. That's why lead gen is such a big buzzword and such a big part of the business. It just gets sequentially easier from there once you get somebody to actually talk to you on the phone. All right. So the sales is easier than getting the person to jump on the call and to book with you and then doing the operations, as long as you've got it down pat, right? Then, you know, it's easier and easier and easier to make that person happy. But how do you get them on the phone, right? If they're directly antagonistic towards you. So it's not just that the self-managed crowd doesn't um, a lot of them don't know that professional property management might is an option, but there's a large contingency of them that are directly antagonistic and think that at best, you know, your your management company is worthless. They think that they can do it better themselves, or they think it's an outright scam. Oh, they're just going to take my money. And that is the that's the word I want to focus on is the money, right? You have to be leading, talking, talking about results and outcomes with these people from the outset. And the only way to get in front of them is through advertisement. This is the number one way to get in front of them because they're not ever going to search. My friend that I talked about that owns that big Dodge work van, he is never going to search best property management company near me. But he's on YouTube all the time. And let me tell you something, I've done all the research on this on YouTube. There is virtually nothing. There are no messages about property management in any way. They're going to be geographically tied in to where people are watching videos. So if you're able to get in front of them and you've got three seconds to start capturing their attention and making implications about the losses that they are making, right? With big, bold claims. And you can't be afraid to talk about money. So this is how you get in front of these people and start getting them into a funnel where you're giving them free information and lead magnets and then sending them down the path to eventually book a call with you with deeper and deeper levels of bringing to their attention the amount of money that they're actually losing. So the people that are landlords, they don't want to hand over control of their number one asset, right? It's like the major part of their retirement plan. It's a huge deal. They don't want to give up control. And giving up control, they think that they're giving up all this money, right? Because I got to pay this guy this fee for something that I can do myself. So we have to get in front of them in a way that is not afraid to talk about money. So when you are looking at any property management website, you're going to see the same thing over and over. Or go to Facebook right now and just type in the search bar property management company or just property management and make a pot of coffee because you're going to get bored out of your skull looking at the same message over and over that talks about services. So property management companies talk about services and it doesn't do anything to turn on the light bulb for a DIY landlord. So I think it's good to take a step back from this and get out of the property management world. And let's just talk about podcasting, for instance, right? So if I come to you cold out of the blue, Tony, and I say, Hey, I saw that you have this podcast. Let's say I'm sending you a cold email. Cold email one says, Tony, watch your podcast. It's great. We provide comprehensive podcasts expansion services. We do video editing, we do content creation, we do distribution to all the major platforms. We can help you out. We're partners you can trust. Okay. This platitude that never sold anybody anything. So you see that, and then you go, delete. Like I'm not, this doesn't do anything for you. Next email that you get says, Hey Tony, we work with podcasters and we guarantee to 10x your subscribers and get you 10 qualified business calls in the next 90 days, or you don't pay with our with our podcast acquisition system, right? Whatever it might be called. So I'm just coming up with some kind of unique selling mechanism, some unique qualifier that would make you say, Wait a second, what is that? I mean, which one are you gonna pick? If you had to, you'd be saying, Let me go with guy number two, and at least hear what he's got to say.

Tony Cline 35:15

Okay. Well, one was talking about features, the other one was talking about benefits. And nobody buys off of features, they buy off of the benefits. What's in it for me?

SPEAKER_00 35:23

Exactly. So when you are selling something, there's four things that you can sell. I'm gonna make you more money, is number one, and they go sequentially in this order of importance. So, number one, I'm gonna make you more money. You work with me, I'm gonna make you rich. That's number one. Number two, I'm gonna help you save money. Okay, that's a little bit better, a little bit worse. I'm sorry. So I'm gonna make you money, I'm gonna save you money. Number three is I'm gonna remove some headaches for you. And number four, which is really in a category of its own, it's kind of more in the coaching space. I'm gonna give you peace and control, and I'm gonna help you to optimize who you are as a person, right? So that you can be the best CEO that you can be. So those are the four things that you can sell. Most property management companies are never gonna sell that fourth thing. But for the top three, they can sell all of them. They're in a unique position because not all businesses can say that, right? Not all of them can say that. So they have to start leading with the money, with the results, with the outcomes. But most of them are scared to do that. Okay. Most of them are gonna be leading with I can save you headaches. So when you get onto a property management website, you'll see the platitudes of we're partners you can trust. Let us take off, let us take the burden of the grind of managing your property. It's those kinds of phrases and words because they're afraid to talk about the money and they shouldn't be, because most people have tons of case studies that they could be pulling out of the woodwork to say, we saved John$15,000 a year, or we helped$10,000 a year to his portfolio because he was mismanaging his property. I don't see anybody having any kind of client testimonial video with a big bold red ticket on the thumbnail that says John saved$15,000. It's just the platitudes. And I think this gets into a lot of different psychological reasons. People want to pretend that they don't care about money. Um, Tony, I want to be very wealthy. I'm just gonna say that out loud. I I feel good saying that. I'm not ashamed of saying that. I think that there's tons of great things that can be done with money, right? But you have to lead that way, you have to be thinking that way, or you can't communicate it to your prospects.

Show Me The Money: Offers That Convert

Tony Cline 37:37

Let me ask you this. So there's there's I spent a little bit of time looking at the psychology of sales, and you had mentioned the the one is I can make you more money. The second one is I can save you money. And I would actually look at, I'm curious to what you think about this. Saving money, I don't think is as powerful as I can keep you from losing money. And I think there's a there's a twist on that where there's been studies where if you give somebody something and then take it away, it's a bigger loss for them than if they just never had it. So saving money is one thing, but if I look at I'm gonna help you keep from losing that same amount of money, there's a little bit more of a psychological hit. So, what do you what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 38:27

I think that's splitting hairs on number two. It still falls into the number two category. And if that's all that you can do, if you can't make people more money, then you should really think about how to split those hairs and talk about number two in which other way that you just described. So we're not you have the ability.

Tony Cline 38:45

We're not taking two approaches then. We're not we're not giving two messages. I'm just trying to figure out as we we communicate this message because we want to talk about making them money, of course. Yes. People want more money, but then when we're when we're doing our value stacking or when we're communicating different messages, are we just you are you saying we prefer to just drive home, we're gonna make you money, and then our next message is we're gonna make you money, but in a different way, and our next message is we're gonna make you money but in a different way, or are we just communicating the same message over and over until they hit? So what I'm trying to do is, you know, there's there's reputation or repute rep repetition of communication. You know, the more people hear from you, the more they see you, the more, the more they come to know, like, and trust you. But they can also get bored of the same message if you're just saying the same thing over and over. So, what I'm trying to do is give the audience, as you're talking about this, a way to be able to take this message that we're sharing with them and be able to implement. You know, we talked about our Google reviews, we've talked about our business page, we've talked about our, you know, our Google My Business page, we've talked about blogs, and we've said, well, all of that is important, but not as important as the messaging. So what I'm trying to do is when they when they finish listening to this, how can they take what we're telling them and either self-implement or understand that it's time to maybe hire somebody that can help them implement it for them? So I'm just trying to get the breakdown of what is the message to them. Is it keep hammering them with the same we're gonna make you make make money? Or are we spreading around the message to try to change it up? I'm just trying to dig through what are we trying to accomplish the most with the messaging here.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Yeah, it's good to tease this out. So the reason I brought up those core four, the things that you can sell to somebody, I'm gonna help you make more money, save money, remove headaches, help you to optimize your personhood. If you have the ability to talk about number one, which not all businesses do, then you have to focus on that. And you have one through line through all of your marketing that focuses on that message. You don't want to get all spread out and uneven. You know, this really kind of comes back to the core question. If you're a property management owner, property management company owner, and you're listening to this, and I'll ask you, Tony, in their stead, what is the reason why somebody should hire a property management company?

Tony Cline 41:21

Well, I think there's really in the 25, almost 26 years now that I've been doing this, there's really only two reasons that I've found. So people hire a property management company to assist them in minimizing the risks associated with being an investment property owner, and they hire a property management company to assist them with maximizing the long-term returns associated with being an investment property owner. So those are the two things. And as a property management company owner, when we were talking to our clients, we would tell them these are the two options, and we try to do both. But if they're ever at odds, we're gonna minimize the risks because one bad risk can wipe out a whole year or two's worth of returns. So those are really the only two things that I've ever found in my 25, almost 26 years of experience that clients want.

Guarantees, Churn, And Differentiation

SPEAKER_00 42:15

And so you hit the nail on the head. It's if you can help them to make more money, that's the main thing. It's this really comes back to 1996, Jerry McGuire. What's Rod Tidwell say? Jerry, show me the money. And I I'm saying this, I'm not trying to say this as a like we've got to be these greedy people. That's not at all what I think. There's so much more to life, of course. But you've got three seconds when somebody is looking at an ad, which is the only way that you're ever going to get in front of these self-managed landlords with a true front-end cold traffic offer that prints. And it has to be talking about results and outcomes with a money-back guarantee. All right. This is what it comes down to. So this is what I'm saying when I say show me the money, right? Jerry just gets fired from uh from the the company that he works at where he's managing the, he's an agent for all these different athletes. He gets fired, he's jumping on his Rolodex and he is talking to everybody and he is talking about, he's losing clients left and right because he's talking about services. Oh, I'm gonna give you more of a personal touch. I'm a partner you can trust, right? I'm gonna cut my commission for you. He's just in a race to the bottom to give all these concessions away. He's never gonna be able to charge a premium price. And then he finally gets on with Rod. He gets Rod on the phone. Rod's complaining about his house falling apart. He's got ants up his wall. His brother TP has a flood going on in his in his bedroom. So he's complaining, but he says, Jerry, but I like you. My wife likes you. But there's only one thing. Rod, tell me what I can do for you. Jerry, show me the money. That's that's all that I want. That's what I want to know from the get-go because I'm an elite athlete. I I've got to focus on my mental health, my family being an elite athlete. I don't care about what you're gonna do for the contracts with Gatorade to get me that endorsement. I don't care about the meetings that you've got to book and what the paperwork looks like. I don't care about what you're gonna do with the contract with the NFL team that I'm playing for. I'm gonna focus on what I got to focus on. You show me the money, show me the results and the outcome, and I'm gonna stick with you, Jerry. That's what he says. So I think if you watch that, if you if you go back and watch that movie, some people come away with like, oh yeah, his main message was he's gonna give the personal touch. He's not gonna have as many clients so he can give that personal touch to people. But no, the real marketing message there that I think we've got to take home is we've got to be showing these people the money that they are losing, but framing it in a way and confronting their expectations that you are a money sink. When you talk about services, you're just an expense, right? You're an expense. So you you have to position yourself as a company that is going to help them increase their wealth. That's what they are looking for. And when you can challenge that preconceived notion, all right. So let's say that you get in, you see this ad for a property management company. If you're using Blue Door Theory, this is probably what it's going to be looking like. You see this ad and you've got three seconds to hear it. And the claim, the big bold claim is we will, we will recover$800 in lost rental income for your property in the first 90 days, or you don't pay. Just imagine that someone sees that. It immediately implies wait a second, I'm losing that much money, and this guy has enough gumption to put his money where his mouth is with this guarantee to show me that I'm that I'm doing that. I gotta, I gotta learn more. So you're talking to them about results that you can get. You're implying to them that you're actually losing money. They jump through the ad, they see the lead magnet that shows them the wealth maximization system that they could run themselves. And we've built this out as a lead magnet for people. It's, I think, like 20 pages long of what we've put together so that these people can go and do this themselves. Most people are going to say, I don't, I don't want to do that. That's that's way too much work for me. Maybe I should consider management. And why wouldn't I talk to this guy? He's making this money back guarantee for me. So I can go talk to him. And then you've got that person on the phone, you run their analysis. Some people are going to be qualified for that guarantee, some people are not. A lot of people get very squeamish about offering a results-back guarantee. This is what we do at Blue Door Theory. I say for property management companies, we will guarantee you uh 45 calls from self-managed landlords and 15 signed agreements in the first 90 days, or you don't pay. And that's the truth. If we don't deliver that for you, you don't pay, right? Because it's our bold claim. We know it's going to work. So that's why we offer that. So if you're able to offer this to people, you're capturing their attention, first of all. You're making them rethink the framework they have in their mind about what a property management company is and does. And then they start to see it as value-based. So imagine you see another ad that says, Hey, we offer tenant screening services. We do rent collection, right? It's just, what does that do? Who cares? It doesn't do anything for anybody.

Tony Cline 47:07

Who cares? All property management companies are going to do those same, same things. So that's not making you different. That's not making you unique. It's not making you a solution to their problem at that point. Right. All right. So in the last few minutes here, let's kind of wrap this up. What would somebody that's interested in growing those 15 doors? You mentioned they can do it themselves, obviously, or they could work with Blue Door. What would what would something like that look like? And I know you just mentioned that that guarantee, but for companies that are trying to grow, which I think is basically every company at this point is trying to grow in the property management space. How do they how do we land the plane here of where do they go from here?

DIY Vs Hiring Blue Door Theory

SPEAKER_00 47:49

Yeah, you've got to be able to know the nuances and sophistication of marketing tactics to create a front-end cold traffic offer. That's that's really what it comes down to. How do we target the that 80%? The rest of the 20%, you've got these PMC hoppers, right? And when you're dealing with them, they they know the game. And because they don't see any kind of unique selling mechanism, they know that they can hop around. So people are always worried about client. Every property management podcast I listen to, people are worried about client churn. This is constantly going on. We hit that first 12 months and then they have the turnover for the tenants, and something goes haywire and they the landlord freaks out and then they bounce, right? They're just gonna go to the next one down the road to your competitor down the street that just has slightly worse reviews than you do, but they essentially have the same services there. So you can either keep on working on demand capture, that one side of the coin, or you can do what no other prop, there's no other property management company doing this that I know of. And I have looked at a lot of them and we've done the research on meta ads and YouTube ads, knowing no one is running an effective front-end cold track of uh a front-end cold traffic offer at all. And if they are running something, then they're burning ad money all the time. A lot of people are scared to run ads because they've been burned in the past, but no one has done it from this perspective of making this offer that is um just so enticing, so intriguing, so attractive that they have to go look at it. That's why we make the guarantee because no one's doing this. So you could try to go do this yourself. I would always encourage people to go DIY it. But from what I've seen, Tony, I've worked with over 100 property management companies on their reviews alone. No one has time to even set up a review strategy. So at Blue Door Theory, we set up the review strategy for you because that is important. So that runs in the background while the front-end cold traffic offer is going, so we can help you to capture more because that is important. And it's something that we can just spin up in our sleep. So why, you know, we might as well. So what I've seen is that most property managers struggle to even come up with a solid review strategy. And that's just one tiny piece of the puzzle. A front-end cold traffic offer is infinitely more complex. You can certainly go try to do it. You can spend hundreds of hours watching YouTube videos spend on some kind of marketing coaching program and go figure it out. Or we can just be your shortcut for it. I don't mean to just do the shameless plug here, but it's a really difficult thing to do. And so if you're there's so many people that are confused about what to do with marketing, they're trying to run a blog on their website because they heard back in 2003 that blogs are important and they're still running with that because it's just out in the ether. So they don't know what to go pick and choose.

Tony Cline 50:35

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

So that's what I'm saying.

Tony Cline 50:37

So if somebody wanted to connect with you, so as we kind of wrap up, if somebody wants to connect with you, how would they go about reaching out and exploring how you could help them do this versus them doing it themselves?

Final Takeaways And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 50:49

Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to bluedoor theory.com, uh you'll you can go through, watch the video sales letter there that I'll explain this a little bit deeper because we talked about this really at the tail end. So watch the video sales letter that's there. You can book a call with me directly on the website. I'm very active on LinkedIn and I uh and looking at my DMs all the time. If you send something over to me, we will connect. Um, that'd be fine. Can I say just one more thing? I know we're trying to wrap up, but there's one other thing that's really important when you think about marketing this way. And this is what the main thing I want to drive home because client churn is such a problem. All right, let's let's let's say that you run a legit front-end cold traffic offer that's talking about results and outcomes with a money-back guarantee, and you sign a number of self-managed landlords, and then they get into the world, they get into it, and they start going to some conferences, right? And then they run into another property management company at some networking event in your area. And the person says, Oh, you're working with Tony, huh? Well, if you come over to us, you know, we could probably save you 50 bucks a month on your management fee. And the guy says, Okay, that's interesting. So tell me about your guarantee. The guy in the property management company says, Well, what do you mean? We we are, well, I can tell you what we do. We don't have a guarantee, but we do have tenant screening services. We do rent collection for you. We take, we're partners you can trust. They're stuck in that old world. That self-managed landlord that is now your client looks at that guy and says, Why would I ever leave Tony who put his money where his mouth is, delivered on the guarantee, made all that for me. That's the real peace of mind that people want, right? And I'm I know I'm getting hyped up about this. That's real peace of mind because they've got this guarantee behind it. So they hear this guy yammering on about services and they say, I'm never leaving, I'm never leaving Tony. This guy had my back. He was, you know, had the guts up front to say this. So it's just you're starting client retention at the very top of the funnel. All right. And that's also gonna capture the attention of the PMC hoppers, the 20% that already know about property management, they're gonna see those ads too. They're gonna get into your marketing funnel, and you're just gonna be sticking out because you have a unique selling mechanism as the wealth maximization system that we help that we coach you on how to run and implement. And it's just so different, it's so unique that it helps you to stand out right now. So if you've got a marketing manager that's on your team, you should take time to go ask them, hey, what's our unique selling mechanism? Why should somebody pick us over someone else? What are we gonna do to go after the 80% of our market that is not even thinking about property management company that's never going to go into Google and search best property management company near me? So I'll close with that. That's my final thought. We got to hit that 80% somehow.

Tony Cline 53:34

Yeah. I definitely agree that there is a wide blue ocean out there to go after to make these people problem aware, then make them solution aware. And and one of the things that you touched on was figuring out how to make yourself different from anybody else that's in the marketplace, because not only do we need to make them aware that they have a problem, that they do need property management, but once they do discover that, what makes us different in the marketplace? You talked about your unique selling mechanism. And I think having something like this gets you through that reticular activating system, that part of the brain that filters you out. You you talked about having them focus on money and making money. And I think that it's a really good approach to looking for new business. So, you know, Kyle, I really appreciate having you on. I know uh it seems like that hour went by super fast, but maybe we can have you back on another time where we can dive deeper into how to actually go about doing some of this stuff and and what you've done and maybe some success stories from your clients. If you do want to reach out to Kyle, hit his website at Blue Theory or Blue Door Theory.com or follow him at Kyle Renz on LinkedIn. So with that, thanks for having you having you on.

SPEAKER_00 54:54

Yeah, hit it. Tony, thanks for having me, man.

Tony Cline 54:56

Very enjoyable. Thanks for tuning in to the Property Management Success Podcast. We'll be back with another value packed episode to help you level up your property management game. If you've got something valuable out of today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss out on future insights and strategies and tactics. Until next time, here's the your success.