Knowledge is Power: Navigating Condo Management the Right Way

Michael Trendota - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeltrendota/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to the Condo Pod, presented by the Canadian Condominium Institute, Eastern Ontario's chapter, your go-to place for everything condos in Eastern Ontario. From governance to legal, from maintenance, management, and community living, we are diving into the topics that matter most to condo owners, directors, and professionals in our region. So today's guest sits in a really interesting intersection. He's both a uh teacher as a lecturer in real estate at Queen's University and is actively working in property management today. That combination gives him a perspective we don't often see uh in this industry. So welcome, Michael Trendoda, to the conto pod.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

Welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Appreciate it. So for those that uh perhaps have no clue who you are, uh, do you want to just give yourself a brief intro?

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Sure. Yeah, like a three-minute summary and compress it really fast. Um, came to Ontario in 2012, 2013. Uh, I did my MBA at Queens, and I went straight into property management as one does. Um, I worked as a partner together for 12 years or so, built out a conduit management company, uh, sold it, and went to teach at Queens. And uh I've been teaching Queens for four about four and a half years now, four years now. And I spend half my time teaching real estate at Queens and the other half in industry at a property management company out of the GTA called GPM property management. Right. So half time there, halftime at Queens, one foot academic, one foot in industry. That's me.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

Interesting. So, like that's gonna you're gonna get a very different perspective because those that are doing, like just doing and not teaching, right, are are constantly going to be, they're still gonna improve their skill set. We have continued education responsibilities, like we're still learning. But when you're teaching somebody, you're also gonna get the perspective of of somebody who has no idea what's going on. Yes, right. And they're gonna challenge you, yeah, in some instances to say, why are we doing this?

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Why is this important? Why are we doing that? Why do we have condo legislation, right? Like these kind of things happen all the time.

SPEAKER_04 2:04

So, how does that dual perspective shape how you see the industry kind of overall?

SPEAKER_03 2:09

It's you know what, it's an interesting question to ask because I'm always going down to the very basics. What is a condo, right? It's uh it's not a built form, it's a legislative structure, it's an ownership structure with shared responsibilities or with shared components, individual components. I'm always explaining that from the ground up. Right. I'm always explaining why we have legislation. I'm always explaining how the industry is moving and shaping. So it forces me to every semester go back to the beginning, explain it again. Go back to the beginning, explain it again. And it means that I spend a lot of time on the basics and I spend also a lot of time trying to stay up to date with how things are changing, because I'm keeping on, I can't give someone 20-year-old knowledge, right? Because that's that's not why they go to university. So I'm forced to keep doing that.

SPEAKER_04 2:57

Interesting. So by by pulling yourself back to those basics consistently, uh, do you see something that doesn't quite hold up like once it gets to real real world value? Something that you're you're explaining to them from the basics, where it's like, you know, we explain a common element, we can explain an exclusive use, all that sort of stuff. Is there anything that you've noticed that as you get into the real world application, it becomes a little bit more gray, less, you know, by the book?

SPEAKER_03 3:26

Okay, interesting. You know what? I actually don't spend that much time teaching condo. Sure. So my my classes are designed around teach us real estate, go, we have one class to do it. So I look kind of like, do I do property management, do I do condo management, do I do evaluation, do I do engineering, do I do law? And I say to the students on the first day, I can't teach all this to you. Right. So I have to pick and choose which parts I teach. So those parts that I teach, I try to teach that those that will stay true, regardless of what industry you're you're in, whether you're in residential property management, whether you're in development, whether you're in condo management. So the the pieces that will stay consistent and those that are applicable around the world. So I actually don't spend very much time on condo, I spend a little more time on evaluation because that's how the real estate management and development industry looks at it, is primarily from a valuation point of view. How much is it worth? How much does it cost to build? How much can I sell it for? What's my margin there? And that's how I look at it. So I try to teach them the underlying theory, most of all, because the theory is going to stay true regardless of when and how you're applying it. So I the I just unfortunately don't have time to really get that deep into operating plans, right? And turnaround plans for shopping malls. I don't have that much time to get into all that. So it's primarily the theory that was going to be true regardless of when and where you are.

SPEAKER_04 4:57

Okay. So let's take it on the flip side then in the property management side of the world. Uh, you come with a knowledge base, you've been doing this for quite some time. Is there something you see as you bring on new team members that you know they learned this in academia? Yeah, and they're trying to apply it in in that space, and the it's just not lining up properly.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Yeah. And the the this is uh it's a kind of a good question to go down because there are lots of these things, and that's when the how it should be done meets the real world, right? So we should have 12 board meetings a year or 10 board meetings a year or whatever it is. But the reality is that sometimes board members don't want meetings all that time, or they want to take two months off for the summer or for Christmas, or here we do things a little bit differently. So you have these trained individuals coming out of schools and they're hitting the real world where they just don't want to do it that way, right? We don't want to go get three bids for this, we want to get one, or we want to get 17, right? And now you're trying to explain to them why one is not enough and why 17 is too many, right? At 17, you're gonna make everyone mad because they have a one out of 17 chance. If you have one bid, well, then are you getting the best pricing? Right, right. So it's trying to you have to take the students who come with this knowledge of how things should be done and trying to give them the leeway to be able to adjust to how the real world does it, but know when to kind of bring it in, right, where it's too excessive, where the real world has too much leeway. Sure. So you have your straight and narrow, you have the wobbly, and somewhere in the middle is how we want to manage, right? If a board member says, you know what, two is fine, well, maybe that's okay, right? But when they want to go to too many quotes, you have to kind of rein them in saying, listen, there's no point after four.

SPEAKER_04 6:45

Yeah, I remember I worked with one client once where we were doing, it was a major project. So definitely want to have competitive bids, you want a proper tender process, uh, ensure that you know you're qualifying these bids, all that sort of process. And and they were like, Okay, we want to take it on a Mercs and we want to go out to everybody, you know, whether they're in in Ottawa or in Toronto or this. And I'm like, guys, like it's not gonna be the right idea. You're gonna get so many uh bids that get brought in, you're not gonna be able to understand who's doing what. Like, I don't know the players in the GTA to say that this this contractor has the not only the boots on the ground staff to be able to do stuff, but the back of office to make sure their invoicing is correct.

SPEAKER_03 7:24

Like, I can't think and this is with their doing that is actually diluting your experience because you could say in Ottawa, these are the top five. Yeah, right. You can say that. But now when I force you to bring in 30 of them, you have no idea who's the top five in Waterloo.

SPEAKER_04 7:38

Correct. And they come in, you know, half the price of all these other teams, and that's that's uh attractive, yeah, right. As a as a board of directors that give this fiduciary responsibility, but you're also just a volunteer in most cases, and your skill set may not be towards you know, bids and and all that sort of stuff. Is there something that you see in the industry that's currently undervaluing academia? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:03

And I think we can get into kind of a larger discussion of what is the current state of training in the industry, how are we going through our CMRA courses? What I think is being undervalued is managers with formal educations. So formal educations, and I think of college, two, three, four-year programs or university bachelor's degrees, they're being undervalued in industry because they're not being recognized for their combination of hard and soft skills. So if we compare that to someone who has kind of worked their way up through the industry, which is a very valid and it's a very respected way of doing things, but with doing that, you're missing certain things. So when I think of an undergrad coming out of, let's say, a business program, and take any of them, they're they're all good. So coming out of an undergrad, they have courses in accounting, they have courses in finance, they have courses in HR, they have courses in law. So they have a deeper and wider base that they could put later on the condo specific knowledge afterwards. And those are the hard skills, but also the soft skills. They've been presenting for four years. They've been in front of classmates and professors for four years. They have these soft skills of how to negotiate certain conversations. So those are those graduates are not being recruited enough and they're not being valued enough to move into our industry. And where you really see this is not in like the first two, three weeks, right? Because you're all learning and you nobody knows anything in the first couple of weeks. Yeah. But where you see the real differences are when they're a GL and you're setting them free. Go out and now you have your own boards. Now you have now you're running your whole generation, your portfolio. And where you see that is they're coming back to you less and they have better to their managers less. They're having fewer issues with retention. They know how to handle more sticky and odd type of situations and manage different, um, different personalities on the board. So there is a difference there between the two. And I'm in my limited way, am I trying to steer our industry into looking at hiring more from formal education and bringing them into our industry?

SPEAKER_04 10:23

So, why do you think right now there's that gap? Like, why aren't we going like in an ideal situation? Like, you know, I'm somebody that went through the grind, you know, started at the bottom and climbed up the ladder that way. Um why do you think that there is a more uh uh apt way for the the companies or the the boards or whatnot to choose that path rather than saying, okay, well, we would like you know, somebody with an MBA or a bachelor's business who's gonna have that skill set. Because I agree, like it would it would make my life infinitely easier if I had that skill set before having to kind of learn the hard way in some instances, right? Like I've been, you know, managing condos now effectively for about six years in the industry for seven or eight. Um and I've had to learn the hard way on some projects that oh, okay, this is why you do something this way. Um, you know, I've created my repertoire and the people around me to help support that. But why do you think that that that's like why aren't the people coming to condo management?

SPEAKER_03 11:25

So I think this is two issues. This is the push and the pull. So the the push is that students coming out of an undergrad aren't thinking of let's start a great reward and career in condo management. It's not seen as a sexy thing. They're primarily thinking of asset management. They are thinking of, I want to work for Brookfield, I want to manage a portfolio of 10 shopping malls, I want to run, I want to spend my time on Excel running numbers. And that's it, right? That the they're thinking of that. They're attracted to brand name and prestige and not getting your hands dirty, if you will, by just by looking at spreadsheets, right? And spending their time doing that and managing large amounts of money, large mortgages, refinancings, working for pension funds. It's seen as a that's seen as like the sexy thing to do.

SPEAKER_04 12:17

Right.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

So they're not really attracted to property management, they're not attracted to the fact that there's stability in the industry, the fact that there is a you run your own schedule. You have your own clients and you have your own reporting that you do to your clients and you're managing your own relationships. They're not attracted to that and a dozen other features. So that's so that's on the student side of it. On the industry side of it, we are not, and I speak as a property manager, we are not going and finding them inside these schools. We are not making a good case for our industry why we should be attracting these types of students. So we're not going to career fairs. We are not putting together our own trade shows, right? We don't have uh like CCI or or any other group isn't going to uh universities or colleges and saying, here are 10 managers, each one has two or three hires to make. We need 30 hires. Come on down, we'll teach you about our industry.

SPEAKER_04 13:13

And here's all the the highlights.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

Yeah, here's the great parts about the industry. Here's a list of who's in this room right now, who's hiring, right? We're not doing that. Right. So, like we're not pulling them in. So it's a combination of the two.

SPEAKER_04 13:26

So, would you say that that's like a recruitment problem industry-wide from your perspective?

SPEAKER_03 13:31

Yeah, it's it's industry-wide.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

It's not Ottawa, it's not Toronto, it's all of it. Right. It's all so I guess then if you were to design the ideal pipeline from scratch, what what would it look like? What would be the ideal world for you know, condominium managers coming up through whatever system that looks like? What's the ideal way?

SPEAKER_03 13:48

So the way I'd like to see this is that in we have our students who have self-selected into business programs. They're saying, you know, I want to be in business. I like to understand money, I want to understand people, I want to understand accounting, I want to understand that. So they have self-selected into the business program. And they are constantly interacted with throughout their education. So let's say they're so uh students in undergrad programs, especially in business schools, are always looking for summer internships. They're looking for something to do in the summer. We need to find, as an industry, a way of getting them into our businesses for the summer. They come to us summer of second year, summer third year, summer fourth year, or sorry, summer uh first year, summer of second, summer of third year. So they come to us for three summers. That's 12 years, 12 months of work they can be doing in our industry. So we need to get on campus and we need to start recruiting them and saying, hey, let's do a summer internship with us. And by the time they graduate, they graduate into a job in one of our companies. So I see it as academic while they're starting to work in the summers in industry. And when they graduate, they're going into industry. So they get a taste of it. They get a taste of it. The ones that hate this industry self-select out, but the ones that like it stay back and come back into it. And during that time, they can be working on their courses, they can be getting their like their uh CMRAO courses, they could be getting their hours and they graduate. And then we have a couple of years where they're finishing off their GL requirements. And what we have at that point is someone who has a couple of years of industry experience, someone who has a formal education and who is ready to move into uh a full portfolio manager role, but also has the capacity to take on more, right? When we look at regional managers or we look at uh district, whatever, whatever the whatever your your business calls them, they have the capacity to actually move into that role.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

Because they have that skill set that's broader from the formal education rather than there. So, how would the industry be unintentionally filter out these individuals? Like um I I understand the concept, like we're not we're not enticing them, we're not we're not letting them know that this exists. Right. You know, I remember and we've had a conversation before on the podcast that most condo managers stumble into the role or they're you know an administrator on a property or they're part of the security team, absolutely, you know, part of the concierge in some properties, and that's how they become aware of this this situation. So, how can we um like still ensure that those individuals, because you know, self self-promoting here? Like I'm one of those people, so I don't want to wean that out because there are going to be you know diamonds in the rough that can do those skills. So, how do you bridge the gap then between the individual who has that kind of skill set and the high performing academia? Yes.

SPEAKER_03 16:45

So I think the those who uh let's say started off at the and it's the same thing in the GTA, same thing, either start off as an admin or you start off as a security or concierge, exact same model applies there. So those should not be looked down on in any way because they don't have that formal education. But let's come up with a way of helping them get that formal education, right? So can we give them so uh when when I look at the CMRA courses, they are the very minimum legally required to be in this business.

SPEAKER_04 17:14

Yeah, and they need some work in their areas, they're they're good in some spaces. They taught me a lot, but I do think that there are gaps, not for today's conversation.

SPEAKER_03 17:21

Yeah, not that's a different day's conversation, but we can have them taking evening courses and weekend courses, and we can subsidize that as part of our business and helping them get through these courses. So, what we're doing is that we are saying that no matter how you get into this business, we're gonna give you the same skills or make sure you have the same skills to be looking years in the future in your career. So I think that's one way we could be doing it.

SPEAKER_04 17:47

Yeah, that's I think that's fair. Uh, it would be up to, you know, obviously the businesses to have the resources to be able to do something like that and the scaling aspect of it. So what would you say is something that a newly licensed manager is is is not prepared for when they first get started in the industry with your experience?

SPEAKER_03 18:04

They are there's a few things that they're not prepared for. One, and it depends on the size of your portfolio, the size of your corporations, the sure amount of money involved.

SPEAKER_04 18:13

Right.

SPEAKER_03 18:13

So we have corporations with million, two million dollar budgets. We have reserve funds in the five million dollar range on some of the upper end uh size properties. So they're not prepared for that size of uh that dollar amount.

SPEAKER_04 18:29

I remember the first uh when I first started, we were doing checks and it wasn't electric payments. And I remember the first time that I had a $10,000 check in my hand. And it was, you know, something simple. It was just like utilities. Yeah. And I'm scared holding this $10,000 check. I never, you know, you can't imagine that kind of money when you're a kid getting started. So you're right. That first time you do the $1.6 million budget, you're going, oh my goodness. And you're doing this budget for you know 200, 300 families. Yeah. Uh, and that's their biggest asset that you're dealing with.

SPEAKER_03 19:00

And if you get something wrong on it, you're gonna have 400 questions about it, probably the next day, probably phone call. So it's the the scale and the size of the industry, the amount of money that's involved. The fact that anyone coming onto your property to do work isn't will be getting paid for that. Yeah, but they're also incurring risk and liability to your corporation. So it's you just you just get hit by the whole thing that this is not, even though it might be two employees or one employee at that property, this is a full-on operation and they're not prepared for that. These are really miniature businesses all in one, especially for the larger, the smaller property is not really like a 20-unit townhouse complex. No, sure. But I look at 100, 200 unit property, these are businesses, they are full.

SPEAKER_04 19:44

Yeah, one of the things I always say to friends or colleagues when they first start kind of cu getting curious about condos is my perspective is that a condo is a non-for-profit business that you're buying into, and the perk is you get to live there. Yeah, the extra added features you get to live there. You're a shareholder, and one of the perks they're gonna give you is somewhere that you can live and you get your own market value on it. So take care of it as it will.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

They're not prepared for that. They're not prepared for the frequent interaction between the industry and lawyers. They're not prepared for the things that you need a lawyer's opinion on and the things that don't. They're not familiar with working within the bounds of a licensing plant framework. There's certain things I can and can't provide advice on because I am limited by that. So they're just they're not used to the the sheer size and scale and complexity of this industry. And I think that applies for regardless of how you got into this industry, you just you just kind of get hit like a by bus. You just get hit by it and you realize, oh wow, this is this is a real operation.

SPEAKER_04 20:44

Yeah, the the industry is definitely a sink or swim mentality for managers as they come in. That's something I've heard repeatedly from from managers that got in just you know around the same time as I did or shortly thereafter myself. Uh, would you feel that that's something that's kind of a curriculum issue with like I don't know, I don't want to call it the CMRIO. That's not the point of the conversation is, but would it be a curriculum issue, or is it an expectation issue from the client or employer?

SPEAKER_02 21:13

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SPEAKER_03 21:48

Oh, that's a good question. I know what there has to be components of both in it. And I think we can also bring in like their underlying education before that as well. So from the employer side, there's no real Soft way of bringing you this into this industry, other than just shadowing someone for two months.

SPEAKER_04 22:05

Yeah, you can bring them onto some smaller properties in some instances. And I'm not going to say that smaller properties are always easier because there's definitely ones that we have that are, you know, 15 units that can be very challenging. Uh, when you get smaller, every dollar uh means something. You have to change the roof. It's divided by 12, not by 100. Yeah. So it's a very different conversation. Uh so yeah, I sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

So that's uh on that, on that side of it, we can do more with the required education for sure. We can also do more with what skills are we expecting them to come into the industry with? Right. What underlying college or university education or a previous experience from their other industry? What are we looking at? Because when we are hiring from that security role, that is typically someone who's coming to us without a comprehensive background in something, in business of some way. In some cases, we do. In some cases, they pick that up very quickly, but in lots of cases, they don't have a background in accounting. They have no idea what a GL is or general ledger. I'm I was I don't want to confuse it with general licensing, but they don't know what a general ledger is, they don't know what a profit and loss is.

SPEAKER_04 23:20

They don't I'm gonna tell you one small thing. For the first, I would say four months, because I started with uh I think I started with law and when I did my courses, then did building sciences, and people kept saying GL code, GL code, GL code. And I'm like, why are there so many general license codes? And then I did the finance course and was like, oh, general ledger. Interesting a great example of not coming in with that base knowledge out of an education system. Right.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

So I there's a I think a lot we can do, and our industry has been maturing, has been forced to mature really quickly over the last 10 years. We've matured more in the last 10 years than over the 50 before that, because now we're forced to have licensing and regulation, which I think absolutely is something that the industry needed. Yeah, it was described as the Wild West. Yeah, the Wild West. And I read about the Wild West. That was a scary place. Sure. I want to live there.

SPEAKER_04 24:13

Yeah, though there's some good stories from some of the senior managers that I was able to get mentorship from before, you know, uh 2015 and and the the good the act that brought in the responsibilities of the manager and all those other pieces. Uh so very interesting there. Um I guess one of the things from my perspective, like don't get me wrong, I love learning things. Uh, I think that's why I really gravitated towards condo management because it was like there's all these different facets of the industry that you can lean into and learn, and it's always something new. Uh, but how much of this role can realistically be taught versus learned through experience?

SPEAKER_03 24:51

Okay. So you obviously can't teach the whole job. You can't teach the whole job in courses. You can't replicate that board dynamic of someone of your sitting across from a president, and you're ex you explain to them that they need to do a $10,000 special assessment for each owner. You can't you can't replicate that very easily. So there are certain things that have to be picked up by experience. I think there's more that you can do in education than we're currently doing, but you can't go all the way. At the end of the day, a lot of this industry, a lot of it will be based on that experience. But what we can do is have more of a mix between the education and the experience. We can have so the summer internships program. That's a way of, and by the way, I didn't make that up. Like engineering uses it, finance uses it, accounting. Legal uses it, yeah. Right. They they do it all the time for this type of industry. So having you jump back and forth lets you get your experience and then bring it back to the class and then build on that experience and then go back out to industry and build on your classroom knowledge, right? It weaves the two of them together. And that's why that's why so many different industries really like this kind of model.

SPEAKER_04 26:05

Yeah, I could see it also really benefiting the condominium manager industry because you're going to get that feedback from those uh people in the education part of the system. Yeah. Right. Like uh you go you know back to school for a semester and then you come back for that summer internship, and all of a sudden you're able to identify things that don't make the the same sense as they did in the classroom. Yep. And as long as you have the right environment, you can now challenge these these norms. Yeah. Okay. Well, that maybe the way we do chargebacks in the industry is a little weird because financially and and on the books and how we want things recorded and all those sort of things. Maybe we should switch it up because this is how we learned it in this particular module in classroom. Right.

SPEAKER_03 26:52

And on the other side, they come back to me in my lectures and they say, Yeah, I'm like, I tried that last week or last summer. That did not work. You gotta fix this, right? So you get the academic side gets that feedback from the real world. Right. Yeah, I went to the board and I told them this is what um the special assessment is, and they looked at me and saying, You did not explain this well, or this is not gonna work. This is like right, you get that feedback going both ways, and I think that will over time create a stronger set of managers in the industry.

SPEAKER_04 27:25

So do you see in your like on the horizon something where the education becomes more specialized, or does it stay in that broad spectrum and you bring in that aspect to the condo, right? Like, do you foresee uh an ideal world where you have a condo manager program where it's very specific to that, or is it is it more ideal to have that kind of greater uh the conversation I had with Jerry Burdeot in a previous uh episode, uh link in the show notes to go check that out. Uh, we talked about the condo manager today needs to be the generalist aspects in everything. Right. Whereas it would be ideal if we can get into those specialists category. It's similar idea. So is it do you envision it somebody with a bachelor's in business or master's in business that then you know sharpens the blade into condos or something where you have a very specific program like they've developed with the CMRAO, but a little bit more expanded upon.

SPEAKER_03 28:28

Okay. I see the former model where you go get your broad, comprehensive education that you can apply to a lot of different things. And then you sharpen that with CMRAO specific courses, saying these are the four, five, six, ten, whatever number of courses that ends up being in the future. I see that that deeper, wider base that can be applied to lots of different walks of life, that can be applied to work in lots of different situations, and then sharpen specifically with the relevant legislation, the relevant reporting requirements of our industry.

SPEAKER_04 29:00

Great answer. I think everybody will like that one.

SPEAKER_03 29:04

I say that having hired from lots of different places and having taught, I've taught at the university level, at the college level, and okay, I've not taught at the primary school or the high school level. So I've taught in two different types of post-secondary. And I think this is the best model for the future of the industry. This is going to like there's the risk of hyper-specializing. If you know only one thing and very well, how do you know how to do the next thing? Right. As I I hear this sometimes saying, oh, this is a fantastic surgeon who knows how to do this, but they don't know how to file their taxes. Right. Or they don't know how a mortgage works. Right. So I'm against hyper-specialization. I like having a generalist base who has picked up the specialization in their area, but still has that huge, that big base of knowledge that they can rely on.

SPEAKER_04 29:54

Yeah, no, completely understand that. And in conversations we had before uh today, we talked about some of the gaps in things like human resource, conflict management, uh, and finance as a broad spectrum. Uh, which one do you think is probably one of the most critical gaps that's being overlooked in the condominium management world? Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:14

Um I think the conflict management is a good place that we can chat about there. It's hard, it's it's hard to train, it's hard to put you in an adversarial situation. So uh it is possible and it is you can do it, but it is difficult to do well. So I I have this um professor, his name is uh Shea Duby. He's a uh former instructor of mine, he's a former teacher of mine at Queens, and he still teaches at Queens and he has a course on conflict and negotiations. And he what he does in the course is he actually pairs them up and gives them challenges of you have to negotiate this with someone else. And he gives them like show notes of here's how you're gonna prepare for this, here's your persona, here's who you have to adapt. So he's trying to create that conflict and have you practice negotiating it and it's all throughout the class. So this is a semester-long class, so you're probably out there negotiating 20 different things. So you have and he builds into it conflict of like you are taking the place of a customer who has just received a 50% price rise, and you need to argue your way out of that if you can. Right. So he creates adversarial situations. Like, so we could be doing more of that kind of role play and that kind of training. It is, I will definitely admit, hard because you can't emulate the emotion behind it of I have a special assessment to that I've just received as an owner, and you, the manager, need to present this to me of why I have to pay for all this. So it's hard to do all. So, anyways, that is the conflict resolution, it's one of them.

SPEAKER_04 31:47

The before you jump into the next part, one of the things that we had done that was successful in the past was uh mock AGMs. Yeah. So we have the manager uh prepare for the AGM, they put together the package, uh, and then they come to the meeting. And the season managers that have been through those uh zones, yeah, call it that, uh, are now the owners in the audience, right? And so, for example, you know, we would get to a meeting and I would make a motion right at the beginning. Can that happen? Can you do that? I'd I'd make a motion that the board has to leave the room, right? Things where it takes you off of that off the prepared script.

SPEAKER_03 32:25

Yeah, that's that's a wonderful thing to mention. I've done the same thing now that I think back about it. And the first I say you're gonna, by the time you get to your first AGM, you will have done 10 mock AGMs with me. The first one, I'm gonna be very nice to you. I'm just gonna listen politely and follow your instructions. And then over the next 10, as you get better and better at this, I'm gonna start getting more and more pissed off of an owner. I'm gonna start throwing issues, I'm gonna start doing all these kind of things. So the training and that it works great. It really does.

SPEAKER_04 32:54

And I've gotten that feedback from my team saying, but I do think that it would be nice that if there was something in the um whether it's in the CMRIO uh courses uh or in some you know more formal positions where there is that sort of uh pressure, because that is probably one of the more challenging aspects of the role. Uh, you know, I say a lot of times, well, we all say it, but whether it's good or not, is that you know the job would be a heck of a lot easier if there just wasn't people involved. Right. Yeah, yeah. It was just buildings. Correct. It was just, you know, the mechanical systems, the finances, you know, one plus one equals two, except for when you need a special assessment. That would make things uh a lot easier. But the reason that we stay in the industry is the people. Uh, you know, I like working with the board of directors that are trying to better their communities, really striving for that. You know, I have my list of owners that I really enjoy having conversations about their day-to-day, you know, knowing about their families and becoming part of those community uh pieces. Um I guess like one of the things we talked about like not getting into you know hyper specialists, and I would agree there. I mean, if I only did one thing and and forgot about all the others, it would become a bit of a problem. Um how can the management companies abroad, because each one's gonna have its own way of doing things, uh take what we've talked about today and apply it starting not as soon as tomorrow, but but next week or next morning. Exactly. So the day after tomorrow.

SPEAKER_03 34:33

Yeah, yeah. So having a going through what does it take to have the skills to be, let's say, a regional manager. Work from there. Your GLs should be trained to be regionals at all times. You should be training them to do that. Your limited licenses should be getting the training to become GLs, and your admins should be getting the next level above. Everyone should always be aiming for that next level above. So we should be always providing that training. And it's not always the training of this is what you have on your plate today, let's deal with it, but more of a this is the theory of an AGM, right? This is finance, this is how you read a budget and how you prepare a budget. So we should be offering this type of training to those who don't need it yet, those who will need it a couple of years from now. So by the time they actually get to it, they already know how to do it. So I'm imagining an annual calendar of in January's, I'm always teaching about this, right? In the summers, I'm always teaching about budget, right? So have like an annual calendar, and there's turnover in our industry. So you can offer these things once a year, and every year you're gonna have someone new who needs to learn these things. So it's more of an internal training calendar where whoever wants to, or you can mandate that everyone takes it, shows up and starts taking these kind of courses through you. So you're gonna run them through the very through the process of how to create a budget, how to create a this. Uh, a couple months before AGM season, you start running everyone through. Let's do AGM refresher again. And those who already are very good at it, they still have to come, but now you give them a specialist role. Right. You're gonna be a board member or you're gonna be an adversarial owner, right? So that constant annual training calendar has, and that's how we keep skills modern, that's how we keep skills fresh, that's how we remind those who haven't done an AGM in six months of how to do AGMs.

SPEAKER_04 36:25

No, that's that's very good. Um, okay. So when we talked about uh, you know, your your your past life, your past experiences, and how you kind of grew your first kind of management company up through acquisitions and then eventually sold off to become a father, you know, very exciting part of life. Uh what experiences did that teach you about the industry? Like obviously, by you know, having your own and then acquiring others, you would have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

SPEAKER_03 36:50

Yes. I one of the things I learned is that there are so many different operating models, right? There are uh models where you have like a more of a community type of vibe where um you have managers working together as a team, where you have more flexible vacations. I know your firm is like that, where you have a support team. There are those who are individuals where you are your own ship. If you don't do it, your ship sinks. That's it, right? So there's that side of it. There's there are companies that specialize in very large properties with on-site teams. There are companies that specialize in portfolio management, right? So there's so many different ways of working it. There's so many different ways of setting up a work order ticketing system or setting up your accounting office. How do they do it? Do you have the managers do most of their accounting? Do you have an accounting? So there's so many different ways of piecing together a management business, and lots of them are viable. There's lots of different ways of building a business in this industry. So I realized that as I was looking and doing the due diligence on these acquisitions. So, like, huh, they operate in a completely different way than we do. Can I buy this? And one thing I learned very quickly is it's not so much this the it's not so much the how the company is now. It's more what is the potential. So if your managers were to all leave, do you have a system to bring in new ones? Right? Do you have that continuity? Do you have the systems in place? But it's also so it's not just the systems, it's also the managers. So these managers can they adapt to a new way of doing accounting? If I give them a new piece of software, are they just gonna freeze and fall over? Or are they gonna say, okay, cool, give us the training, I'm happy to do it.

SPEAKER_04 38:36

Right. Are they gonna adapt and make the changes? Right. Or are they gonna get stuck in the mud?

SPEAKER_03 38:40

Yes. So there's there's the the business itself, the company itself, and then there's the individuals within that business. You have to look at both of them because if one of those two is off, you have a big problem on your hands when you're looking at buying it. So then there's also the strategy of uh which businesses are trying to grow um in one city only and have a high concentration, which ones are trying to spread across with a lower concentration on each city. Where are you doing why? How are you keeping your costs in life? So there's it's such a fascinating industry because there's so many different ways of running a business properly.

SPEAKER_04 39:14

Yeah, I guess I I never I knew that, but I never really thought of it from that perspective. Right. Because something like uh, you know, a restaurant, yes, they're gonna have different operational things, but a lot of that is going to be copy and paste to be in that successful aspect, right? There's so many restaurants that you can, you know, uh bar rescue or whatever, the guy who comes in and just okay, copy and paste this, and then we'll fix some of those issues. But you're right, in the the condominium management industry, especially because it is still pretty young, uh, hasn't really uh knocked off some of that, like I don't want to say dead weight, but some of the inefficiencies that may exist. Uh, what did you find was one of the harder things when you would go through that kind of growth and the acquisition and and trying to make some changes that you thought were perhaps more efficient, more cost effective? Uh, what were some of the the hardest things to overcome there?

SPEAKER_03 40:07

One of the hardest challenges was inappropriate pricing. When you have a corporation that's paying 20 bucks per door, but they are commanding $40 per door services. And you have to look at them and you have to say, I either have to raise your costs or you have to find somewhere else because I can't possibly run this business and giving you the service that you expect. So looking at this, and the board is entirely nice, they're entirely reasonable, they're great people. They're just getting more service than they're paying for. And if my business is to provide you that service, you have to pay for it appropriately. So that's one of the hardest things when you're looking at a business and you have this owner who's looking to sell their business, and they say, I think it's worth this much. And you look at it and say, No, it's not. It's not worth that much because you, the owner, are working 80 hour weeks. Right. I can't bring in someone at your salary.

SPEAKER_04 41:03

Yeah, you're in that treadmill stage of just constantly being able to just go, go, go. Right. You're not looking at it from a scalable aspect. Uh, you're just in that kind of I don't want to say mon pa, but you're in that very beginner stage.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

You're in that science where you're doing everything yourself. Yeah. Looking at this, and and I'm running the numbers on this. And I said, if you were to leave and I have to hire two people to replace you, the profit that you think you're making disappears. Right. This is now not a profitable business. Why would I buy it from you? So there's the acquisitions I had, which is about seven, and there's the due diligence I did on 20-something businesses, yeah, where you look at it as like, this is not a business. This is this is a job that you own as a very hard job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:46

Because you're not big. You know, when we we talk about this quite often uh from the manager's perspective of um really identifying the role as a condominium manager as a profession. A lot of times there's this stigma of, you know, it's just property management, you know, uh glorified superintendent, things like that. Like you're gonna hear me say that a lot of times on this podcast. But um when the legislation started to come into place, we talked about the Wild West. Wild West is gone. Yeah. There are due diligence markers that we need to hit, and we need to make sure that you as a corporation are hitting, whether that's compliance, uh fiduciary responsibilities, maintenance. You know, there were those uh horrific uh incidences down south in the states where the condos, you know, cease to exist because they weren't being taken care of properly. The skill set that's required that requires some education to get there uh needs to be treated as a profession, which means that the time that I'm spending on your condo is no longer letting contractor one, two, three in the door. Right. That's not what I'm doing. No. Maybe some days I go and I and I and I'm definitely providing access and doing some of those pieces. But the professional aspect that I need to bring to these communities to protect them is definitely undervalued. It's something we talk about all the time. And I agree that uh condos, board members, owners, the industry as a whole should be looking at their management team. And if it's not the right team, switch it up by all means. Um, but looking at their management team as a resource to utilize the same way they do with legal counsel, right? Uh or their engineering firms or or you know, those specialized contractors that know roofs better than anybody else. Um why do you think, and and if you don't have an answer, that's okay, but because I'm springing this one on you for sure, is that why do you think that condos have been undervaluing the manager to this day?

SPEAKER_03 43:50

I I think you your your opening sentence uh made this clear is that there's a conflation of the super and the admin and the manager. So when I'm teaching, I get one, I have one class that I teach on property management. The first slide is a picture of uh Mr. Trigger, if you watch Friends, or Remy, if you watch New Girl. That is what people think of as a property manager. That's not a property manager. That's one stereotype and two of a superintendent. So uh uh of of someone who is just on your site to fix keys, open doors, let in contractors. These are two different jobs. So we as an industry need to focus on differentiating ourselves. So this is why, right, on your business cards, you put in GL. Yeah, right. You put in the fact that you have your license. This is why we as an industry need to be educating our owners of the training involved in becoming a general licensee. So we need to be pushing on that. And we as an industry need to be elevating our managers and showing that no, this is someone specialized. This is why they need to they can't provide service next Friday because they're at a conference. And we're by the way, we will give you service in a different way with a backup system, but our GLs need to be at a conference, right? Yeah. Continuing to learn, continuing to start with that skill set. So there's a big thing that we need to do as an industry to educate and elevate our owners about what a manager is and what they do. And this also feeds into my teaching. When I could say, no, I'm not advocating for you guys to become supers. I'm advocating for you guys to become licensed managers with education requirements, with continuing education requirements, with legal requirements. So it's very much a us presenting ourselves as an industry and us presenting ourselves as individual managers as being something different.

SPEAKER_04 45:49

Yeah. So I want to touch on the individual manager as well. I think that it's very important, like for those that are listening to the podcast, uh, that are, you know, perhaps board members and they're going, like, oh my goodness, like, you know, we're gonna push this. If the fees on managers are gonna go up, and then they're just trying to become, you know, lawyers when they're not lawyers, etc., is that the individual manager needs to take some of that accountability as well.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 46:13

In in the sense of elevating the the product is what I'll call it. Uh is that, you know, I as a manager, uh when I go into a board meeting, an AGM, heck, when I'm meeting with a contractor, I have a sense of responsibility. Uh, I have a sense of due diligence and making sure that I'm doing the best for that corporation to the best of my ability, and trying to provide a level of service that's above what would be the the preconceived notions of what a superintendent, uh, what the preconceived notions would be of a condominium manager. A lot of times we talk about it to, you know, our team members internally, and I talk about it to colleagues like you're a condominium manager. When somebody calls you a property manager, politely correct them. I'm a condominium manager. I'm not a proper man, licensed condominium manager. I'm a licensed condominium manager. Uh, you know, I I agree that there needs to be this industry-wide uh pickup of the manager and and provide that level of professionalism to that, but I want to be very clear that it's also up to the individual manager to to treat each scenario and each owner with a level of respect. Right. That that you are not, you know, you didn't get in this profession to be able to uh lord over anybody. It's to be, you know, the the forever professional that's there to help every single person. Right. One of the things that we say to our clients all the time is that I am here to help every single owner the same way that I would help a board member. And I tell my boards this if an owner calls me and says, How do I get rid of the board? I will tell them the step-by-step process on how they get rid of the board because I'm there to support every single owner. Right on the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not just the board of the very good. No, I love that. But every manager, my opinion, uh needs to take that same responsibility to their client.

SPEAKER_03 48:00

Yeah. And I think of other ways that we can do this in terms of as an organization to provide some of the, let's say, the evidence or the support structure for it. So it could be as little as uh having headshots on your website of your GLs and saying this is their licensing and this is their training, this is their education, right? Focus on that. When you are introducing a new manager to a board, your regional or your president should be coming in and instead of them just showing up and saying, hi guys, I manage your building now, right? We should say, I'd love to introduce you to this is Joshua. Joshua's been with our firm for this many years. He's a general licensee. This is his experience, this is education, right? It needs to be warm, the crowd needs to be warmed up a little bit to understand who they're dealing with and who they have the honor of working with. So there's there's certain things that we can do as an industry or as individual management companies to just support that. And even training up, how do you sit? Right? Do you sit slouched over like this or do you sit like this? Are you dressed in your PJ hoodie or are you dressed in a nice polo or a nice shirt? Are you how are you? Business casual is fine. Yeah, business casual is fine.

SPEAKER_04 49:08

You know, if you got that hoity-toity client, then throw on a jacket. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:12

This this right now, this polo is my default of that's right. This is my go-to shirt. Yeah, this is the go-to shirt. This is the go-to. I think I have seven copies of this. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So some sort of standard around how do you dress, how do you speak, how do you present yourself, right? Having that, and these are the intangibles, and these are one of the things that I go back to business school teaches you, right? I kid you not, I had a class on how to shake hands. I had a class on how do you shake hands, right? You take the web of your hand, you aim it at the web of their hand, right? And like that. Right. So these are like the intangibles of being a professional, right? How do you wear a suit? How do you tie a tie, right? Which button do you put, oh, do you for the jacket on your jacket, right? Yeah, business school teaches all these things, and for four years, they're giving each other presentations or giving me the professional presentations, and getting a rundown from the the the professional, you know, the teacher, the the lecturer, the professor. I I literally had a professor going to me and saying, Michael, both of your buttons are are both of the buttons on your jacket are buttoned. The bottom one should stay unbuttoned. Here's why. Right. So intangibles, right? The things that are not wearing your jacket properly does not mean you're a professional, but most professionals will know how to wear their jacket properly. So they are associated together.

SPEAKER_04 50:32

And these are social cues that also come to, you know, downstream. And as you, you know, when I go into, for example, an AGM, like I want to make sure that the owners feel confident that the the management team supporting their community has an understanding of how to do certain things. So yeah, I show up, you know, proper, I'm there for the meeting, you know, I'm mining my P's and Q's, uh, you know, always in that professional stance. So I I think that if there was a mechanism, if that's you know, the bachelor's in in business or master's, et cetera, uh, and that that's a skill set that can be then transferable into the industry to elevate the professional, I think that that would be uh fantastic. Um, listen, I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I'm sure that there are many other tangents that we can go down. Sure. But we we also want to respect the listener, and I don't want them to have to feel like this is uh, you know, uh the four-hour podcast uh that uh some others do on the the world. Uh CCI is is always trying to bring out education. You know, that's the big mandate of CCI, especially Eastern Ontario's chapter. We're really trying to get the people that understand condos, understand the industry to you, the audience, and and have an opportunity to to engage and get some some comments there. So please feel free to uh comment on the video, let us know some stuff that you'd like to talk about, whether there's something that I should have uh brought up to Michael that I didn't get a chance to. We can always you know bring them back for future conversations. For those that are listening, Michael, how can they find you?

SPEAKER_03 51:58

They can find me on website trendota.ca. I bought my own domain name. So I can do that, or find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Michael Trinoda on the planet. So if you search that into LinkedIn, you will find me. Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it. Joshua, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

Thanks for tuning into the Commando Pod, your source for all things commando in Eastern Ontario. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and share this podcast with your fellow Commando community. For more resources and upcoming events, visit us at ccieasternOntario.ca. Until next time, stay informed, stay connected, and keep your community strong.