PM Collective - The ART of property management

Onboarding, Upgraded

Ashleigh Goodchild

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We explore why “figure it out” onboarding fails and how a six‑module, AI‑supported framework helps new and experienced PMs close skills gaps, stay compliant, and work with clarity. Beau Miller shares the Laire program, the Legislation Guru, and practical ways to turn AI into targeted training and better client outcomes.

• recurring onboarding gaps that stall growth
• six-module structure and staged skill-building
• AI skills analysis to reveal unknown unknowns
• weekly webinars and light, practical homework
• legislation updates via the “Legislation Guru”
• differentiating proposals and CMAs with AI research
• focusing AI on defined problems and workflows
• results from the first five months of Lair
• who should enroll and how leaders get visibility
• coaching that builds confidence and healthy team culture

Reach out to Beau for a demo: “Can people reach out to you and say, actually, Beau, can you, you know, do a demo for us in our office?” “Yeah… we are launched.”


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SPEAKER_00:

All right, today we have a very special guest, and that is Bo Miller joining me today. So, Bo, how are you? Thanks, Ash. Thank you for having me. Excellent. I'm very excited because we we know each other reasonably well, but we uh don't think we've done the podcast before, or have we done one a long, long time ago? No, no, this is super fresh. Excellent. So thanks for joining me. I do appreciate your time because I have been noticing that you've been working on something in the background and I don't know much about it personally. So I, for very selfish reasons, would love to find out more about it. But I also try to use these opportunities for people to really know what's available to them. Everyone that I speak to knows that I'm a huge fan of demos, new products, knowing exactly what's available to help the industry. Because even though there's not something that we might need right now, I don't know what I'm gonna need in three months, six months, 12 months when I have certain pain points. And so I love knowing what's available. So in six months' time or 12 months' time, when something comes up and it's like, you know what's gonna fix that? Bo's gonna fix that. And I know exactly what my next step is, which I think is really incredibly important for all business owners. So this is going to be everyone's teaser with something that is available in the industry that they may need now or in the future. And so I'm going to pass it over to you, Bo. Just talk to us about sort of where this all developed and the product, and um, and yeah, we'll we'll talk through it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. You you're so right, though, is there's so many different consultants out there that have their different kind of niches or specialties. And yes, there's consultants that can help across the board with everything, but I found for me it was it, I was being really diluted in what I could offer the business by saying I could do everything for the clients I was working with. So yeah, so I suppose the the biggest thing for me was coming out of my own real estate agency and saying, sure, I'm a consultant, I'm an expert in property management, how can I help you? But I started to recognize it was the same things being asked over and over and the same pain points in property management businesses. And they were exactly the same pain points that I had in my own business. And I felt like the strongest place that I could give back was in the space of using AI to answer the questions that our new industry people had and answer them really quite quickly so that they didn't interrupt the rest of the office. And when you've got a new person to the office and they don't know how to do something, they ask a lot of questions in the first week. And then by week two, they've gone silent because they feel like they're interrupting the seniors. The seniors are getting disgruntled, they've got so much work on their plate, they don't know what they need to do, and they definitely do not have time to hold the hand of the newbies in the office. And so that was where each agency that would call me, hey Bo, I'm having problems with this staff member, I'm having problems with this process. It seemed to all align back to the onboarding process that the property manager had had the moment they joined the business. That didn't matter if they'd joined the business in the last three months, the last three years. It was all the same missing components of information that they needed. And that in turn was stopping the leaders or the business owners for them growing the business because they become the gap filler for the things that their team can't do.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. The um I'm just sort of onboarding in our team has, I want to say that it's good now, but at the end of the business journey, you know, after 20 years, it's very, it's pretty embarrassing to be honest. And and I think what happens with onboarding is we tend to, or my experiences is that I've tended to do exactly what was done to me. And so for me, at an age of 18, I was put into a seat and I was, I just had to work it out myself because my business owners at the time were a flight attendant and a pilot who just decided to invest in a company after a business owner had died, and they had no idea. And me being someone who is happy just to jump in and work it out, was left in that position because no one else would do it. And so, because my experience was that I had to work it out myself, during my business journey, I've had the same thought that that's how everyone, it's easier to put people to learn to jump into the seat, work it out, and ask questions as you go along. And if you haven't ever had or experienced a good onboarding experience, then you actually don't really know how to do it. And generally now the people like me, you know, who are 40 plus, are the ones that are doing and responsible for the onboarding. Well, that's how we were all onboarded 20 years ago. It it hasn't shifted, has it?

SPEAKER_01:

Really? But I have to say, I I was extremely blessed with my first experience in property management. And to say that I was 25 years ago walked into a property management only business 25 years ago, that was rare that you would see that. Women leaders, also rare that you would see that. And their onboarding of me as an a 17-year-old into that business, I ended up doing BDM work by the age of 19 and signing up people because of the support and the hand holding and not being afraid to answer the questions that I had. And I ask a lot of questions. If anybody knows me, you know, you sit down and I will just drill you with every question until I get all of the information. So, you know, these ladies had to put up with a lot with with, you know, Bo in their office, but you know, credit to them. They helped me understand the A to Z in property management. And I think that's what's made it possible for me to create a really logical way of explaining or training and helping property managers see what it is the job that they're doing, but not just what are they doing, why are they doing it? You know, what are the risks if we don't go into the job of property management with the end in mind? So I developed a six six module process guide, I suppose I would call it in my business. And we would onboard and train in these six modules. So there would be certain tasks that you would learn in, you know, your first three months, you'd take on three, and then your next six months you would take on three. And as a part of that, I have a questionnaire uh that I would do with the team each month to find out how they were going in their learning joint journey. So they would evaluate and then I would evaluate. And so straight out the gate after boutique, I created a skills analysis tool that I could use in those businesses I was consulting with. And of course, AI had just started, and I was able to use all of the information in my brain, all of the information in my onboarding and my process and procedures, and turn it into uh an AI tool that could help me assess the answers that I was getting, like the written answers to these assessment tools in the six modules. And then the the the conversational questions that I would ask, so I tee it with the the human touch. Between that, I was able to find the gap analysis of the things that those property managers didn't know. And so there is the issue is if they don't know and they can't see what they don't know, they can't do their job completely.

SPEAKER_00:

No, we don't know what you don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

We don't know what you don't know. And the boss doesn't know what you don't know either because they don't have time to ask you what you don't know. They've just got time to answer the questions that you do know. And look, it takes experience, I suppose, to be able to see the gaps. I I couldn't say that I could give it to you and you've got a year's experience and you could see what the person doesn't know because it does take a long time to understand, you know, the job of property management. Um, but I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to creating that. And the more students that that come through my LAR program is starting to help me develop and hopefully one day, and not too far away, it'll be ready to then put into the business. So as soon as you have your own team member, you can use this to gap analysis on your own and check what it is you've missed in that training plan. At the moment, that's what I'm doing for you through the Lair program. Um, but I do hope that I'm I'm gonna be closer to being able to hand it onto a self-management tool. So wow.

SPEAKER_00:

And and so would you is this designed or will it be designed for the onboarding the new people into the business regardless of their experience, or is it something that would also work well for an established team where you don't have anyone coming into the business, but we just want to bring it in for our established team?

SPEAKER_01:

What's really interesting is I designed it for new recruits. My thought was if I can get them at the beginning, if I can get them as soon as they start. And in my experience, the best property managers that I've ever trained have no real estate experience at all. You know, they're they're just coming from a home looking after children. They're coming from a retail background or a pub environment, they're the best because they've got great conflict management. But I I designed it for the baseline, no experience, right? As an onboarding tool for people into the industry. I've uh worked with a lot of kids out of school, straight out of school, very young teams. So that's how I've been able to use this program to build it for that market. But what's been really interesting is my close friends who have their own agencies have given me their whole teams to work through this program. And what I'm noticing is even the people with three years experience that are in portfolio management roles are completely unaware of the gaps that they have. Just unaware of it. Yeah. And that's what surprised me the most. I didn't see that that was an opportunity, but I certainly now see it as a training tool. We do a once-a-week webinar, 45 minutes every Monday, and that goes for 18 weeks. So it's a full six months of spending time with me, getting to know me, getting to know where my standards are and what I expect in property management. And then as part of that, they get little bits of homework. It's not, it's not a huge amount. They're they're very small, you know, they probably only spend there'd be 30 minutes max a week after our webinar that they go through their homework. And not every week. We don't, I don't make them do too much homework. I've got kids and I don't like helping them with homework either. But what that homework is, is it's to go back into the business and look at things like what is the management prospectus that you give to your clients? Because you would be surprised how many people in your team don't even know what we hand out to the client and sell to them. They're quite happily managing the maintenance and doing routine inspections, but they don't know what standard was set the time they signed that management authority. So it's been really amazing to, you know, empower them to go and then ask their principal questions. And then I've been getting messages from the principals going, they're just asking me questions about this. They didn't know that they didn't know it. So it's been really cool.

SPEAKER_00:

They, I think, you know, you mentioned how originally it's designed for the new recruits. And I think that that's probably a space where it does work really well because they are in that that learning phase on a personal level. They're on that in that learning phase where I think we get to a point where there are so many people out there where they just stop being curious and they stop learning and you know, they recite that they've been in the industry for this long. And it's when I speak to some clients, because you know, I trialed this junior fee schedule and senior fee schedule for a while. And when I did that, and I used to say to people, like, your junior in the office is fresh out of the course, hungry to learn, hungry to, you know, to really develop. Where sometimes, not saying all the time, but sometimes you've got those people that have been in the industry for 20 or 30 years. That means that they've been out of the learning environment. Yeah, you know, haven't refreshed them. Like people should have to refresh their course every five years. They've been out of that for 20 or 30 years. In a way, it that you could sort of debate that that's a risk in itself. Yes, they've got the life experience, you know, with everything, but it's there's still a risk, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So I created a so I call it it, it it definitely has an AI support tool in the program. So inside of Lair, you get the legislation guru. And that legislation guru at the moment works Queensland based, because obviously that's where I'm located, but we're in the um throes of developing it for each state. So you get your own legislation guru. And the thing is, is legislation changes over time. Queensland, especially, we've had so much change. And I would hazard that most of the more seniors don't go along to those trainings. And we were just talking this morning in a session. I asked a question, I said, you know, there was a condition of entry on re-inspection of a property. You know, when is it okay to do a reinspection? What is allowed in this instance? And I had 12 people on the call this morning, and one person put their hand up. She did her course in the last couple of months, so she's very newly licensed and she was able to say, yeah, I knew that rule. No one else knew. And they were the more experienced people, they weren't aware. Because in so many instances, we just go and re-inspect properties because we didn't like how it was presented, right? But here they need to be in breach of their agreement. And there's actually a dollar figure that is written into our legislation. If it is more than a week's rent, then it is deemed a breach that you could re-inspect. But no one knew that. And, you know, that's because legislation over the years does get modified and defined specific to problems that are happening in the industry. And if we're not obsessed with legislation, I mean, I'm slightly obsessed with legislation because I like to look at the black and whites of how we do things. And certainly that's how we can create AI tools to help us when there's black and white, which is why it's um it's been really easy to go down that path with Lair. But yeah, if you're not black and white and you come up with the rosy colours of how you can actually tackle property management, it's usually gonna put you in a rabbit hole, you know, if you you're going with the emotional side rather than the black and white. So yeah, it's been interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm gonna throw and I hope this isn't an awkward question. I apologize. I don't edit my podcast, so you're just gonna have to answer this as best you can. But it just came up in my mind. Al, like, you know, when we're speaking to tenants and and tenants, I was actually I was actually doing a mindful communication uh workshop the other day, and I was sort of saying, you know, if it becomes too heated, I straight up say to people, listen, like I I've told you my understanding of that. If you need to seek further advice, then I recommend you call the Rewa Hotline or you call Demons and you know get a second opinion from them. And in my mind, I just thought to myself, I think some of those governing bodies should also, you know, purchase an access access layer so that when they get a call for their hotline, they can put it in. I mean, I know it's not designed for them, but if I was someone on the hotline, I think that I'd probably personally pay for it myself so I could do it. Is that something that's gone through your mind, like, you know, of who else it could help from that level?

SPEAKER_01:

Or are we just like 100%? It's even, you know, it's almost like a self-help for landlords as well. And it it is AI is going to a space, you know. I I I do spend a bit of time in here trying to work out how we can personally coach people in this space. You know, last night I put up a little post because actually I think it was just a story on Chat GPT can now create reminders to me to check the market every Friday.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I you know what, I screenshotted that because I was like, good idea, Bo. Yeah, I screenshot it so I can do that.

SPEAKER_01:

But every Friday it can research for me, right? So why would we not be going every uh once a month check what changes have happened in legislation and provide it to me so I can share it at my team meeting? You know, like there's so many things. We don't have time to do a lot of the proactive work in our business. We're very reactive, but we can certainly use AI to do that for us to help us keep up. Yeah. There's so much potential in the space of AI, and there's only so many hours in the day.

SPEAKER_00:

I know. I'm just thinking of like of all these ideas, and I'm sure you they're already in your brain um with yeah, where you could go. It's gonna be hard to potentially, you know, refrain from all these, you know, in a men's state hyperbole. Do you struggle with that?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I don't. And the reason I don't is because I'm really, I'm really clear on the problems that need to be solved. And so I think that becomes the issue as soon as somebody calls me and they say, Hey, can you teach me about AI? AI has so many different options to help, you know, to solve problems. But if you don't know what the problem is you're trying to solve, then I can't I can't help you. So that's where I get really clear on what I'm passionate about. So I'm really pla passionate on getting clear on what it is that our team needs to do their job, getting really clear on what the business wants to do. Like I could be working with a business that wants to, you know, grow the rent role and growth is where they need to go. So how do I get leads? So that part there becomes really clear that that's your problem. How do we get leads? So then how do we use AI to tackle the space of leads? Or I might be dealing with a business that that literally right now their problem is retaining clients because their staff doesn't know don't know how to do the job that they do. So, right, how do we elevate them to understand how to do their job properly, answer the questions quicker? And so once we get clear on all of that, we can go down the rabbit hole of automations and using AI to do all of those things. But I just don't think as a human race, many of us are ready for the automation space of AI yet, because we don't know how to fix the problems or we don't even know what the problems are yet.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. It's um I I think you know what you've mentioned is you know about very be about being very intentional with the the use of it, which I know with my chat GPT we do have intentional GPTs that we've created. I was on a podcast the other day and I'm waiting for it to be released because I I think that I need to reframe something that I finished, that I that I worded. I was a guest of this podcast, and they had said to me, where do you think you know property management is going? And and they had mentioned sort of the AI. And I said, you know what? Like I actually think that people are very, very slow learners when it comes to implementing AI and technology. And I know that it's it's in it's moving incredibly fast. I don't think we're fast enough to keep up with it. And I think it's going to potentially like what I worry about is that it could get to a point where people just go, you know what, I'm just not gonna use any of it. It's just too much. And so that's that's a concern that I've got. But what I am seeing, and I think as real estate agents, what we are gonna rely on more is the products that we already use using AI and automation as opposed to us, you know, going and getting a whole new, like finding a whole new product or personally using it. I need I need your product, you know, property me or I re whatever it is, I need you guys to have the AI and automation because I don't want to know about it, but I'm happy that you've got it in the product. And I I feel like I I and I just wasn't sure if I articulate it correctly, but that's sort of the way that I feel like that it is. It's not the person that's adapting the AI, it's the products we're using adapting it that we already are using. Does that make sense? It 100% makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, you think about majority of businesses in property management have probably got a tech staff of minimum three products that they would go into, but reality is that they haven't got, you know, the market research tools that are tacked onto that. There's so many different tools out there, and they're not built on AI. They're built on old database technologies that have maybe been re uh repackaged uh every you know 20 years, but they're not AI tools. We're gonna, it's gonna take a while before some very AI tools that are built just because AI was there. That's just gonna start now and it's gonna it is moving so fast that that's not what the reality of our lifetime is gonna be. Our children's lifetime, yes, they're gonna have the much better programs out there than what we are, but we've already got some really great we've got some great workflow products coming to the market right now in property management. You know, the workflows that are available in some of our existing product suites is great. It's just a matter of setting them up properly so that they do the job you want them to do. And there becomes the problem again. Do you know what you want to do? Do you know how many times you want to touch a client? You know, how often you want to communicate? Can you trigger that in the automations that are already in your system? Because AI itself, it needs to know what you need to do. It can't come up with that without you telling it. And so that is where our software programs will have to come to the play and say, this is the best version of how to be a property manager. And traditionally, the industry of software has not been able to do that. In the past, you know, you open up your software package, you start your new business, and you open it up, and there's like five template emails. That's still happening. Yeah. That is still happening, and that it will continue to happen until somebody comes into that space and makes a difference and creates a proper workflow. But if we do that, then we're all going to look the same. We're all going to be vanilla. So we don't really want that either. So we just need to get better at working out how it is, what is it our agency wants to do to have that point of difference.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And and um and point of difference is such a it's a really interesting thing because when I've I've also been to I'm doing these audit workshops with officers, and I say to all of them, it's the person that's different that actually generally gets the business. It's not the person that's better because you don't know if you're better or not. But if you're different, you're going to get it first, and then you prove that you are the better option later on. And I wish that more people understood that. And there are a few little things that you can do inside your business. You know, it's like even just with the CMAs that are coming out, you know, everyone uses maybe everyone uses RPData or everyone uses the same looking one where we've moved. I don't know whether you know Michael from Lisey, but we have started using Lisey ones just because they're different. Like and when a client gets our stuff, they see that you get three proposals. Okay, we'll go with the different one. I wish more people understood that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it AI, in a way, if you just use Chat GPT, you could you could actually smash that space. It does still take time though. So it's not the efficient way of doing it, but you could certainly have more research done using Chat GPT than you can with any of the other forms packages that we use. So I think that will be an innovative space that we'll see quite early on because it's so easy to do. Right now, you could literally say, you know, property on 123 Smith Street, give me a market analysis, show me the last five properties in the area that have been rented, what price they were for, and tell me what are the key types of people that move to the area and make sure you search all of the social pages for that information as to why it's a good suburb to live in and quote some reasons. So you could do that, it would print out straight away. You just have to format it nicely at the moment. I mean, Chat GPT does link with Canva at the present, but I haven't been able to get it to do anything special yet. So time.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, that's um, I'll come back and actually grab that transcript that you just said, actually, and give that a go. And uh lucky I record these. And then and then yeah, and but then it would be just a matter of just either putting it into a nice Canva template yourself, you know, or getting your offshore team to do it or something later. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, that's a that's a really great tip, I guess, I think to finish off with people who are listening today to, you know, even something just as as as simple as that might be a new way that you can develop it into the business. And I j I feel like if people can start using getting familiar with the chat GPT and and different sort of products like that, and but using them a bit more creatively, not as you know, too boring, but more specific, like you said. And then but you do have to constantly use them, you have to immerse your yourself in it and and continue to push the boundaries with it, because if you don't and you don't use it at all or you're stubborn with it, it's just going to be too hard to get into the natural, into the natural use and for it to become a norm. We really do need to do that. But I think as well, like is your tell me about Lair, is Lair fully launched out? I know you've been working on it for about six months where it's been available for six months, but are you physically like launched out to the public? Can people reach out to you and say, actually, Bo, can you, you know, do a a demo for us in our office? Is that something you do now? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we are launched. Uh we've had it for five months going with students uh doing the the work and uh got some really great runs on the board now. And so far, I think I had 29 students in the last six months. So that's been a really good test pilot number, which I'm really excited. We've been able to do that all at once and and and still get really good value. Out of that, I only had two people that didn't make it past the third week of work and they they left us. So that's always a you know, something that happens. But the great thing is through the program is the the office was setting them up for success at the very beginning, put them in, give them the tools, and then I help monitor and make sure that they're doing okay. I give the the leader the feedback to know whether they are doing the homework, doing the work, turning up to the webinars, and yeah, set them up for success with a career plan after they're finished with me so that they can go out to the business. So we're the six-month program, we've got one more left, and those 27 people will be all completed. You can start at any stage though. So we we do it in three-week modules. So yeah, they can start at any stage, go through the module program and have their own self-led program. So usually that first couple of weeks of a new recruit in the business, you don't know what to do with them. And that's where I noticed that the the new uh students will start and they'll go really fast in the beginning and do a lot of the self-led training, and then they'll slow down as they start to get their tasks and they get to go and do entry condition reports on their own or routine inspections or anything like that that they're going and doing, then their learning slows down, but we still hold their hand for further six months.

SPEAKER_00:

Is it something that is more likely a business owner, you know, booking their team in or their property managers in, or a property manager on a personal level investing in themselves? Have you found any difference?

SPEAKER_01:

Mostly it's been business owners that have come to me, uh certainly the last couple of recruits. Although it was my my last student that that started, it was a senior property manager that reached out and said, I've heard about your program, I've got a new assistant starting. Could you help? And then her principal said, Yep, absolutely. We sent we did the presentation with the senior, presented it to the leader. It's extremely affordable. So it's a it's a very, very easy investment. It's not gonna hurt the bank because we do do it in a group and it is very self-led. So the principal was straight on. And yeah, so I think it can come from both ways. Certainly, my target would be to speak to the the principals first because they've got to pay the bills, right? Um, yeah, if you are noticing in your business that you've got team members that might need a little bit of hand holding and a bit of support there, and they might have been around for a little while, then this can work to that advantage too, because we I do do a bit of one-on-one work in the process just to yeah, to see, see where your gaps are and see how we can support you.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, amazing. Um, I was Dennis did a a really nice video the other day, and I just think it's worth mentioning. He talked about how the role of a coach or a consultant is to push you through, you know, an uncomfortable, you know, an uncomfortable process and things that you put off. But then the coaches, so yeah, so to push you out of your comfort zone, but then to support you while you are working through that. And I think when you just mentioned that there was a couple of people that dropped off, I thought to myself, you know what? It would have actually been it, it's a it would be really uncomfortable going into. Using a product, putting themselves out there and really trying to get comfortable with, you know, AI and any learning. And the the this is the purpose is that having someone like yourself to hold their hand while they go through that uncomfortable journey is sort of what your role is. And then they become more confident. And it was just a beautiful way of describing a role as a consultant. And I love that. And I think that's exactly what you're doing with it. So yeah, it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And it opens up dialogue, right? Like it just being able to have conversations in your office is so important. And you you don't want these new hires to not ask questions or not be open to coming to you if they are uncomfortable. And I have found that the more support they get, the more supported they do feel. And uh I think you're gonna have a great, a great hire, someone that's trained right from you know day one. They come in and and they're mentored and backed by, you know, the the high level standard. I mean, that you couldn't want for any more, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. Oh, well, you're doing wonderful things, and it's it's only I mean, it's fabulous now, it's only gonna get more fabulous, and I just can't wait to to see it, you know, eventually all develop through more agencies around Australia. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it, and and I will chat to you soon. Sash.

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