What could you accomplish if you never had to take another maintenance call?
Ethan Lieber is the CEO of Latchel, a real estate platform that helps property managers streamline their maintenance workflow. Today, Ethan joins Bob to explain how Latchel leverages the Amazon model of crafting measurable, transparent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure customer satisfaction and discuss the common themes across SLAs for tenants, property owners and service providers.
Ethan walks us through the maintenance workflow in Latchel, describing how their system plugs into a property management company’s existing processes and what they do to notify a property management team in case of emergency. Listen in to understand what information is available through the Latchel online portal and find out how Ethan’s team can take maintenance operations off your plate—so you can focus on growth!
A full time-stamped transcript of this episode is below.
Topics Covered
[2:39] The Latchel origin story and how the service streamlines your maintenance workflow
[6:55] How Latchel leverages the Amazon model of crafting measurable, transparent Service Level Agreements
[10:19] The common themes among SLAs for tenants, property owners and vendors
[12:34] What the maintenance workflow looks like in Latchel and how it changes based on an issue’s level of urgency
[18:57] How Latchel plugs into a property management company’s existing processes
[21:30] The real-time notification system Latchel uses to notify a property management team in case of emergency
[22:48] The information available through the Latchel online portal + how property managers can prioritize vendors through the software
[24:35] The three Latchel subscription levels
[30:57] Ethan’s challenge around overcoming fear to 10X your current performance
Connect with Ethan
Email ethan@latchel.com
Connect with Bob
Email info@ncpropertygroup.com
Resources
Sponsor
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Bob Preston: 01:39 Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Property Management Brainstorm show. I'm Bob Preston, your host, broadcasting from our studio at North County Property Group in Del Mar, California. If you're new here, please subscribe so you have ongoing access to all of our great episodes and if you like what you hear, please pay it forward with a positive review. In today's day and age of high-performance companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others, customers have come to expect only the best when it comes to an organization's service level. So why should property management companies be any different and why shouldn't we as property managers have a service level agreement otherwise called an SLA as a mindset for our organizations? I have with me today as a guest on the show, Ethan Leiber, CEO at Latchel who I had the pleasure of hearing speak at the Cal NARPM conference last week about this very topic. Ethan, welcome to Property Management Brainstorm.
Ethan Leiber: 02:34 Thanks Bob. I'm really excited to be here. Happy to share some stories and dig in.
Bob Preston: 02:40 Cool. Hey, we got to see each other last week at Cal NARPM where I learned a lot about you and your company, but for our listeners, I think a good place to start is always to tell us about yourself and what's going on at Latchel.
Ethan Leiber: 02:53 Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think maybe the easiest way to explain what Latchel is all about is actually to a simple question to ask you and that question, how would you like to create a new revenue stream and never take a maintenance call again?
Bob Preston: 03:07 Sounds good to me.
Ethan Leiber: 03:08 Yeah, I would hope that would be the answer, right? What person in business doesn't want to create new revenue streams and streamline their workflows? Right? And that's what Latchel does. We help property managers create new revenue streams and streamline that maintenance workflow specifically.
Bob Preston: 03:25 And how did you get into it? How did you come up with the idea for and you know, what's your background and how did you get into the business?
Ethan Leiber: 03:32 Yeah, yeah. Maybe I can explain my background by way of actually talking about the Latchel founding. It's a relatively interesting story like any company's founding and it maybe starts from a very classic place. Started actually in a dorm room my freshman year of college, which is where I met my co-founder Will. So, the two of us went to UC Berkeley, that’s where I met him and that kind of was the start to this path where we eventually created Latchel. Of course, the actual founding of Latchel show came about a decade later, but I studied economics in college and went into a software product management after school. So I spent a whole bunch of time building mobile applications and web applications, a lot of which actually connected contractors to homeowners that were doing renovation and remodel work. So, I had a good amount of experience in that network building and you know, job delivery to to contractors and Will have actually gone into supply chain management. So, if anyone's actually like an operational kind of savvy entrepreneur, you may have heard of things like Six Sigma processes.
Bob Preston: 04:38 Yeah, sure. Of course.
Ethan Leiber: 04:40 That's actually what he studied and that took him to Amazon. Then the real interesting part of the story here is he's at Amazon building their two hour, two hour delivery networks across the world. When his grandfather retires from his management company, he decided to retire at the ripe old age of 92.
Bob Preston: 05:00 Oh my goodness.
Ethan Leiber: 05:04 I hope Bob, I hope you retire before 92.
Bob Preston: 05:08 I plan on it. Let's hope so too. I've got a ways to go before I hit 92 but I think I do have a few years on you, right?
Ethan Leiber: 05:15 Yeah, and for me, I, you know, my dream was always like be a very successful entrepreneur so that you can retire early right now, whether or not that actually happens, I don't know. I mean, I love business. I love being an entrepreneur. I'm sure you do, and I can see why his grandfather did work until 92 then 92 he says, all right, you know, it's time for me to settle down. I'm going to spend some time vacationing and so he retires and will my co-founder at lot she'll and sub bearing the brunt of the burden managing that company. And this is while he's at Amazon. So there's a smaller management company in the bucks, 35 properties and maintenance is really the big thing that was kind of always bogging him down. And because he was traveling internationally for Amazon, a daytime call here, even if it was noon and then he might be having to take a call at midnight his time. And then when he got back into the States, of course he has to worry about the midnight phone call with an emergency coming in. And it was just, it was a lot for him to handle and that's when he contacted me for some help because he knew about the software I had been building. We do a little bit of research, see what solutions are out there. We don't really find much. And after talking to about 50 different management companies each, we noticed they were having the exact same problems. And that's when we dove deep and said, let's build a platform to help manage that maintenance operation. Because if we can take that off the property manager's plate, that's going to allow property management companies to focus on growth instead of focusing on like day in, day out maintenance. And even if it's not focused on growth, well how can we help you focus on running turns faster and doing value add renovations.
Bob Preston: 06:57 So the session you hosted that I got to see last week at Cal NARPM was using the Amazon model as a backdrop to what you call the SLA mindset. So now that explains why Amazon, why you use that as your model because your roommate and your partner now. But what do you mean by the SLA mindset? Maybe you can explain that to our listeners.
Ethan Leiber: 07:19 Yeah, probably easiest for me to describe, you know, why we call it SLA mindset from the top down. And it actually starts with the sort of foundation principles on which your company will operate. And for lateral, we actually built those from Amazon. We pretty blatantly just stole their leadership principles because we loved them so much. And because they were such a great foundation for Amazon. Most important of these being customer obsession. And then when you look at customer obsession, it all comes from these service level agreements. The service level agreements are the kind of service level to which you're providing it, that promise to the customer. It's the definition of what customer obsession is going to mean for your company. And so when I say SLA mindset, really what I'm talking about is putting your entire company, your whole service, design the whole operation into that mindset of what does the customer want and what are the checkpoints where we can validate if they're getting what they want. So a Jeff Bezos actually has a really cool quote. He says, “start with the customer and work backwards”. I've kind of been talking a lot about how you define what the customer wants and you back in to what that service level agreements going to be. Right.
Bob Preston: 08:37 Is the SLA in most companies published or is it purely an internal metric?
Ethan Leiber: 08:44 It can be both. You know, one of the guiding principles at Latchel is transparency and it's one of the things we actually believe is what every customer of ours wants. Whether it's the property we're working with for the tenant, we're working with people on transparency. And actually I think in the real estate space in general, not even just property management, it's been hard to create transparency and a lot of the companies you're seeing now that are excelling in customer service, part of why is because they're delivering transparency. So it is important. And the reason it's important too is when you can set that service level agreement and make it known to your customer, that's when you're going to have the most opportunity to exceed the expectation and get that positive review.
Bob Preston: 09:30 Hey, previous to starting my property management business, North County Property Group, I was in the telecom industry way back when, a with a company called Polycomm and also some um, wireless companies. And from the perspective of a high tech company in particular telecom company, it was a pledge of up-time. You know you're, you're going to be up, oh we used the term five nines 99.999% of the time. This is kind of a technical or reliability SLA, but for Clairemont Mesa property management companies it's a little bit different. It's almost a guarantee or a promise of human performance. Is that how you would classify it in this context?
Ethan Leiber: 10:09 Yeah, that's exactly right and it can be either of those things as long as it's measurable. That's what's important. The SLA has to be measurable, needs to be metrics-based and you need to be able to effectively monitor it.
Bob Preston: 10:21 One of the things that I have always found interesting about property management and being in this business is that we think of ourselves as having three different categories of stakeholders. One category is our Clairemont Mesa property owners, our clients, the individual investors, whatever. You know that category of property owners. Second is our tenants and the third is the vendors. And I suppose there could be SLA’s that kind of go across all three kind of with some common themes. What would some of those be? I mean, I think we're already talking about some of that, but are there any common themes that run across?
Ethan Leiber: 10:52 Yeah, so you know, Jeff Bezos. So, I'm going to go back to Bezos. We love Jeff Bezos over here at Latchel, but um, he says like as you're, your kind of backing into what customers want, you actually want to focus on the things that don't change. And that's it. That's a really good framework for understanding what does everyone, all the stakeholders you're working with, what do they want? Focus on the things that don't change about what they want. Everyone wants to feel like they're cared for and loved. Right? So how do you set up SLA’s that create the feeling that we care about you? Like the biggest reason a tenant will usually leave a bad review is they feel like you don't care about them. Biggest reason an owner's going to leave is they feel like you didn't care about them. We actually mentioned this in that workshop.
Bob Preston: 11:37 Yea, I remember.
Ethan Leiber: 11:38 It was like 74% of both owners and tenants. So your clients and the tenants will lead for the same reason. 74% leave because they feel like they had poor service and a lot of that comes down to you. Did you create this feeling about caring for them? So, like when we kind of go to that abstract level, like you can kind of categorize these things that way. People want to be cared for, they want, they want to feel that working with you is convenient. Right. They don't want to feel like there's hurdles all over the place. Like every month I need to reach out to get that statement. It's not convenient. Right?
Bob Preston: 12:11 Yeah. It should be automatic and it should be consistent.
Ethan Leiber: 12:14 Yeah, it should be consistent. Consistency is key. You can apply it to maintenance too. On the tenant side, like it's not convenient if you have to put in the same request multiple times, you want to put it in one and be communicated with to know that you know, moving along and actually tenants care less that thing gets done fast. They care a lot more that during the process of getting it done, they feel cared for.
Bob Preston: 12:36 What I'd like to do is you mentioned the three different groups and kind of the consistency required. Let's focus on maintenance now for a minute, a work order generation and vendor dispatch because this is a huge part of keeping all three of our stakeholder groups, particularly the tenants and the owners, but you know vendors fall into that too as one of our stakeholders, and this is the area where Latchel really specializes. So what I was hoping we could do here, Ethan, is dive into some of the basic stages of maintenance or the checkpoints, if you will, of what the maintenance workflow looks like and where there might be measurable outcomes around which we could possibly form SLA’s.
Ethan Leiber: 13:15 Yeah, maybe a good way to approach this would be to walk you through what a flow looks like. If a tenant is doing maintenance and Latchel is coordinating this process description. I can stop and talk about like the SLA’s we have. And then you know, anyone listening, you can take those checkpoints and apply them to your own flow, whether or not you use your Latchel, all that, that doesn't matter. But the checkpoints are what, what's really important here. So you're always going to kick off that maintenance. So, with the request that comes, and that request can come in in a couple of ways with Latchel, most of the time it's going to be called in or texted them, right? So the tandem cell have a dedicated line for maintenance. Or sometimes they'll actually call like the main office. And if you have an IVR, right, you can transfer them to that dedicated lateral line. So let me call in. That's the first interaction we pick up the phone in 60 seconds. I've talked a lot about that. And the reason I talk a lot about that one is your first response time to the inbound requests is actually one of the most important factors in getting a positive review later at a 10 and a half to wait even 10 minutes, even five minutes. You know, we're such an instant gratification, like lifestyle now. It's like no one wants to wait a second for anything. Right? So our next checkpoint here is actually our capability on troubleshooting and this actually isn't so much an SLA for the tenant as an SLA for any owners because for the owner it's really important that you're capable of deescalating emergencies and troubleshooting to fix things on the phone. Because if you don't have to dispatch someone, that means you've saved the money. Obviously that increases the NOI, net operating income of the property. That's good for the owner. Right? So, you received the request and at that point you're going to have a different flow for an emergency issue versus a non-emergency. And actually, for the normal requests and emergencies, one of the things you can do at this point is set SLAs based off the type of problem. And generally when you set the assessed delays, you want to look at time to get the maintenance appointment booked. Unless it's actually a property damaging emergency, then it actually becomes important. When can you actually get the person out to work on that fix and so for property damage and emergencies at Latchel and a lot of our customers will have a two hour SLA for that within two hours you need to have someone book heading over to that property to fix that thing that could be causing property damage. This would be leak. It could also be like serious safety hazards for the tenant so that you'd want any of those to be a two-hour SLA. They're going to be a whole other set of emergencies that won't cause like imminent damage to the property, but they're still emergencies that will cause damage if not addressed soon enough or be safety issues and for those you generally are going to want to set the tone for hour and some things, some States and counties there will actually be 24 hour laws or on certain types of maintenance issues. Not for anything that's not an emergency. That's a normal request. What we like to do is say we will have that appointment booked within five days, and the reason we say five days, generally you're not actually going to wait five days to have the appointment booked, but the reason we say that is if a tenant's on vacation or a tenants not being responsive, you're going to have that light truck time. So, you want to give yourself some time to actually get that appointment booked, right?
Bob Preston: 16:46 It's on your, it's on your radar, you're talking to the tenant, you're talking to the vendor, but getting it connected and actually somebody to the property can take a few days sometimes.
Ethan Leiber: 16:55 Now the next best checkpoint in this process and whether you're using software to help with this or not, it's absolutely something you should do is know when that appointment is going to wrap up. So if you're manually kind of sending out your technicians and vendors at least know when they're going out to have that job done because you should be reaching out to your talent. When that appointment finishes confirming that their issue is fixed and then collecting review from them. This is your best opportunity to get a positive review. So we actually have an SLA to property managers we work with that their average review from tenants will be 4.5 out of five stars. Our actual average is 4.7 out of five stars on all tenant reviews, but you know what are you using lots of to do it or not check in with a tenant at this point, this is your best opportunity to get a positive review. You just finished something that you said you would finish for the tenant unless he did a poor job meeting. Your SLA is during this process. The tenant is going to give you a positive review. You're going to say, yep, my property manager did exactly what they said they would. The job got done, thumbs up and then you can take that review and have it go onto your social media pages. And that creates good light brand reputation.
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Bob Preston: 19:00 Hey, so look, full disclosure, we're one of your clients. If you fit in with other companies like North County Property Group, kind of walk us through how that works. How do you, how do you plug in with us from a practical standpoint? Uh, the call comes in, the email comes in, how do you guys get it? How do you jump in and take over and kind of what happens from there? Just sort of at a high level.
Ethan Leiber: 19:23 Oh yeah. So part of this depends on what platform you're using. So it's going to work a little bit different if you're on Rent Manager where we have an API integration versus like they'll be on the Property Where or AppFolio or if you don't have a system, um, which believe it or not, like we actually have quite a few customers that aren't actually using, you know, one of the big management software. So a lot of it depends on what platform you're using and our customers kind of span the board on what they use. So, it doesn't really matter what you're using, Latchel can plug in and sometimes it's different ways, but it can plug in with your setup. Now the probably the most important things to just mention are every customer that turns up for Latchel for, they're getting a dedicated number and that number is basically the assistant line for the tenants. And they can call that number, they can text that number. When a customer starts with us, they can pass that number out. In addition to that, you can actually configure your phone system to route, like any call from the tenants to that line or a motive. A lot of our customers will do is they'll say, you know, for maintenance issues press two and then that kind of process to it comes to watch and we're processing that depending on the system you're using. Sometimes like when we intake the thing, it just is going to load right into your system. Other times, like if we're not patched in to your software and then some of our customers, what they do is they'll take a real time email notifications, we send them and just pop them in the next day for normal requests. Right. So, it kind of depends again on what you're using. We also like it so we can also work for the other way where if a tenant actually goes into an existing portal, you have, we can set up the portal, actually send those requests right to lotto and then Latchel picks up that process from there. Generally, though for emergencies you really don't want them using your existing portal because none of the existing maintenance portals for any of the big software’s do a great job and really understanding the issue. So generally, for emergencies you actually are much better off having them go straight through the Latchel line rather than going into a portal first. Cause it's really easy for it to mistake things as normal requests.
Bob Preston: 21:34 Yeah, that's how we have it set up. It's the after hours, we have the after-hour service with you guys where Hey, if you're having an emergency, please press one or whatever it is. And they connect basically to our line with you and you guys take over from there. Um, and then I'm assuming there's some sort of notification process. If there is an emergency, something going on the property, the Clairemont Mesa property management team needs to know about it. How do you guys handle that side?
Ethan Leiber: 21:54 So Bob, are you telling me that you're not the one that's receiving all the real-time notifications?
Bob Preston: 22:00 I uh, well actually, believe it or not, I still take call every third weekend. So sometimes I am never going to get so warn your ward and your team, you may get, you may get the big cheese.
Ethan Leiber: 22:14 Bob, I'm going to let them know. But yeah, more or less like, yes, we, anytime something comes in real time, email notifications go out as we're actually troubleshooting issues and updating the status on those, you're getting real time UIL notifications. Um, you can also be logged in to Latchel’s portal real. See all this stuff happened in real time. Like of course like we don't expect anyone to actually just be sitting by their email. Refreshing getting those notifications. We're sitting in the portal point of these is so that when you actually look like come in and the next day and you open your email, you'll see everything that happened, you know, while you were away.
Bob Preston: 22:51 Now you mentioned a portal. So that I kind of know the answer to this. So I'm asking some of these questions is kind of teeing it up for you because I want our listeners to understand. So that kind of has a connotation of having a software platform that people are signing into. So Latchel not only is a service that you're answering phones and dispatching and things like that, but you're doing it through a software platform. Correct. Maybe can you tell us about that a bit?
Ethan Leiber: 23:15 Yeah, that's right. I like to kind of describe us as a tech enabled service. Like fundamentally like software doesn't solve this problem. You need to solve it with people as well. Property management, it's always going to be a people business maintenance coordination. It's a people business, but you can use software to support that and create a huge amount of transparency in the process. So, for a lot of our customers using a certain urgency services, they're really not logging in that often, but when you do log in, you basically see an history of the work orders that have come in. One of the cool things is when you access any of the work orders in the software, you're actually seeing all the texts, communication, email communication calls that happened for that work order. So, you can literally go in and listen to the troubleshooting calls on any of these issues that have happened. Also, when you log into the portal, that's where you can modify some of the rules and configurations so you can change your vendor priorities. We work on priority system for vendors. So you might say, you know, plumber A's first for plumbing, plumber B is second, and then for drain clogs, you know a different plumbers should be first. You can get really customized like that so you can log in and change those settings. You can log in and change like who the escalation points are and all that stuff. So, all the rules around here, you're set up, you can change in there.
Bob Preston: 24:39 Tell us about the different service levels you have. I mean, and I don't mean service level agreement, but your subscription I guess would be the better, the better term. Yeah, I think you have three different subscription levels as I remember.
Ethan Leiber: 24:50 So we have the emergency side of which there are two flavors. So a lot of folks like you, Bob, right? You're using us for just the after-hours stuff at this point, correct?
Bob Preston: 24:58 Correct. Well, daytime calls during normal business hours as of today. Yes, that's true.
Ethan Leiber: 25:07 Is a daytime call on Christmas, is Latchel going to handle that for you? Right? Yes. We have that. We call it after hours. Like we have that version of emergency service and then we have a 24/7 version of it where we would actually take all of the calls even during business hours and in these cases like Latchel’s, handling coordination and end for emergency stuff. But all the normal requests, you're getting those notifications, Hey, we got these normal requests, you know, then it's up to you Bob and your team right to coordinate that and attach that normal request. And then we have the final service. It's our full surface where we're handling all the emergency stuff and then the normal request, and I just want to say like a lot of this stuff we're handling, it's you're kind of in out maintenance. Um, we're not hailing like project management work, right? We're not coordinating through home warranties, we're not handling, you know, project management for unit turns or things like that.
Bob Preston: 26:09 Ethan, I always like to ask my guests as we wrap up to tell us a quick story, if you will. This gets kind of personal, so hopefully it's something you're willing to share something about yourselves. Maybe it's something that was a big impact in your life, either personal or professional. And is there a story you're willing to share with us today?
Ethan Leiber: 26:26 Yeah. So maybe make, this will make us a little more fanatic and I think it comes down to the importance of like grit and perseverance. And I'll start with like my first interaction here on this. So the first job I ever had, I was actually working for my father. He was a real estate agent, so I was in high school and my dad put me on the phone and said, you're going to make a hundred calls to expired listings every day and book me appointments to go relist the home. That's like, because that was the first time I ever really liked in any kind of meaningful work. Right.
Bob Preston: 27:01 Tough job. That's a tough job.
Ethan Leiber: 27:05 Tough job, I was like 15 when I started this by 18 I had like three years of just like cold calling owners to reenlist their home. Two funny stories there and you know, in, in, in that kind of environment, you're going to get 95 screw you. You'll get five people talking to you and hopefully one of them said, yeah, sure, you know, I'll meet with them to see if it makes sense to relist, you know, and that kind of set the course for where my focus would be. But the point of this is to say it was building that grit and perseverance where I think it put me in a position to realize that I was capable of doing entrepreneurship because I think anyone listening to this that runs a management company knows how hard it can be to be an entrepreneur every day you're climbing an uphill battle. Um, and at some point you hope like it feels like you're gliding downhill, but you also probably know intrinsically that as soon as you feel like you're on the downhill climb, does that mean you're actually missing something? Right. Does that mean actually you've gone, you've gotten comfortable and now someone else is going to pass you? Which kind of took me actually into, at one point getting really into boxing. So, I don't know if you would watch boxing, but I actually really loved watching older YouTube videos of Muhammad Ali fights Joe Frazier. Yeah, the absolute classics. And my favorite is actually the series of Ali Frazier fight and you know Muhammad Ali, he's like this amazing individual, like defined what it meant to be a boxer. But I was always most impressed by Frazier because this guy would just take punch after punch and it was just grit and persistence that got him through every fight he had with Ali. And he was never knocked down and didn't he like that's what it means to really be an entrepreneur, to not get knocked down. And if you do get knocked down, you get right back up and you keep charging forward. That was like how Frazier fought, you know? And I think like the point of this is to say like it became about grit building. Only last thing I want to say here, Latchel was a Y Combinator bought company. They're an accelerator in Silicon Valley. The first week going through, I accommodated, this is for lotto. We sat down with a group partners and they ask you what your goals are every two weeks for the business and for Latchel. We wanted to grow a thousand units every two weeks, which sounds like crazy, right? Like how are you going to have a thousand units into the maintenance platform every two weeks? And Aaron Harris, who was our partner at Y Combinator, looked me dead in the face when I said a thousand units, and he said, if you're only growing a thousand units every two weeks, you will fail as a business. As in, a lot of people would hear that and be like, Oh, I can't do this. But having like that grit, building the responses, the exact opposite. I basically in my head was revised to say, you're right, if we're only doing a thousand units every couple of weeks, the company will never be where I want it to be. So, I need to find a way to eventually be able to move this business to the needle of 10,000 units every two weeks. How can I do 10,000 units now? Our business is way different than most property managers and the property manager will come to you and be like unthinkable to be doing 10,000 units every couple of weeks. But I would challenge everyone listening to say, if your goal is to do 20 new homes, let's say every month, what's stopping you from doing 200 if the challenge was in front of you to do 200 sometimes more than you were thinking, how would your tactics change around growth? And I think you can kind of use that, that experiment in more areas than just grow. You can probably use that when you're coming up with SLA’s.
Bob Preston: 31:02 Good stuff. Hey, thanks for sharing and kind of motivational to me right there too, Ethan. I mean you, you're leaving me with some words of wisdom that are quite motivational to go back and look at my business in those same, those same ways, kind of the stair step approach. If you're, if your Clairemont Mesa company is it a lull or things seem to be easy for a while, then maybe it's time to start looking around and saying, okay, what's next? You know, what do we tackle next to take this to the next level to bump it up. Good stuff. Hey, I'm having a great time talking to you and we could go on talking about this all day. I love it and it's been super interesting, but just because of the time point here, we need to wrap up today's episode and a, I guess last remaining thoughts, any words of wisdom for our listeners about Latchel and how you could help them with their SLA and if someone wanted to learn more about Latchel and get in touch with you, how would they do that?
Ethan Leiber: 31:52 Yeah, I think the only piece of advice I can give, and maybe it relates to the whole focus on like perseverance and grit is I think the biggest thing that blocks a lot of management companies from going beyond what they believe they can do is fear. There's this awesome line from the book Dune, which is fear is the mind killer and that's absolutely true in most businesses and I see it a lot in our property management customers. Fear can stop you from achieving a lot of what you want to get to and that can be fear of increasing prices. It can be fear of charging tenants for added services, but if you let fear hold you back the same way Aaron Harris sent it to me, he looked me dead in the face and said, you're never going to get to where you want to be. The only thing I want to like impart everyone with is don't let fear these mind killers. There's no reason to be afraid to experiment and try new things and you're not going to get better by staying the same. Don't let fear stop you from charging what you're worth and don't let fear stop you from charging for better services because people are willing to pay for it and if you want to get in touch, you can actually email me directly. My email is ethan@latchel.com but if you don't want to talk to me, you can talk to anyone else that latch old by just going to latchel.com and clicking any of the buttons on our homepage that'll direct you to a calendar to book some time with us.
Bob Preston: 33:19 Cool. Hey, I love it. Good episode and thank you so much for being on the show. It's great information and I think our listeners will really appreciate the time you took today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Ethan Leiber: 33:31 Bob it was like an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and I hope that one day we can get you to come onto the Latchel podcast.
Bob Preston: 33:38 Absolutely. Would love to. I can share my experiences as a one of your, you know, one of your clients, one of your when your subscription holders. Hey, well listen, as we wrap up today, I'd like to make another quick plug to our listeners to click on the subscribe button and give us a, like if you will, please pay it forward with a positive review to help encourage more great guests like Ethan to come on our show. And that concludes today's episode. Thank you for joining the property management brainstorm show. Until next time, we will be in the field working hard for our clients to maximize their property value and rental income and maintain top tenant relations. And we'll catch you next time.
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