Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Stacey Salyer Show, the podcast for property management leaders ready to think bigger about growth. I'm Stacey Salyer and the only acquisition strategist in this industry who sat on all sides of the m and a table. I've been the buyer acquiring a 370 door competitor during COVID using seller financing.
I've been the seller building and exiting a seven figure business. And I've been the corporate evaluator as director of acquisitions, assessing over hundreds of companies nationally. That means I know exactly what you're thinking, what you're missing, and what actually works when it comes to buying and integrating in this space.
On this show, we dig into acquisitions as a real business tool. Not luck, not someday. You'll learn positioning, strategy, numbers, and integration from someone who's actually done it all. Let's go.
Stacey Salyer: Well, welcome back, my friends, to The [00:01:00] Stacey Salyer Show, where we talk about buying and selling property management companies. And today, I have a wonderful guest on with me. He also hosts his own show, which we will talk about. But I wanted to have him on to talk about how he has built his brand and built his entire business and what his future brand-building goals are and how it can relate to buying or selling your property management company.
So welcome Mark Ainley from Chicago.
Mark Ainley: Well, thank you. Thank you. you said I'm wonderful. I, I
appreciate that, but maybe not. So thank you.
Stacey Salyer: Ah, you are wonderful. You're cool. Well, yeah, we've gotten to know each other over the last, I think, couple of years. through our good friend Pablo Gonzalez. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think we, I think you were at the same content dinner I was at. Was that in Colorado? Yeah. Yeah
Mark Ainley: I got to r- ride the scooter there that night. That, that was a good time.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, I did not ri- I did not ride a scooter, which is good. I, I have ridden them, but not that night. So awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me [00:02:00] and excited to jump in
Mark Ainley: Let's do it. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. So when we were chatting we were talking about like how we could get together and kind of talk about, what you've done in your business and built it up.
I know that you've looked at acquiring some companies and you haven't had any actually come to fruition, but we thought it'd be kind of cool to talk about how you've built up your brand what you've done for that, and then some of your future plans for that, and how that could relate to building your business for sale, right?
Mark Ainley: Yeah, exactly. I've always had... There's a book out there, "Built to Sell," I think I read at some point, but the concept of setting things up where you can step away at any given point. And it's down to even the silly things of the value of like your, your URL or not changing out your URL 'cause there's value in it if someone else ever wants to buy it.
Those are things that, like I said, we haven't been able to acquire one yet. But those things I'm looking at when I'm trying to consider options for buying somebody. So, that brand value I think goes a very long way and you'll get far more than as [00:03:00] someone's just buying out your contracts.
Stacey Salyer: Yep. No, I agree. And I think I've been in property management for 22 years. How, how long have you been in?
Mark Ainley: I just ju- right around the same time. Tw- September will be
23, so tw- we're at 23. We're about the same path there
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, we're both at the same property
management age, which really I think 22, 23 years equals like
Mark Ainley: Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Forget dog years, it's property manager years.
Stacey Salyer: I know. I know. So yeah, and I will say, I think in property management, and I have said this before, and, and when I owned my property management company, I will even raise my hand and say I was not really good at marketing.
I thought I knew marketing but once I exited and I started this new adventure, I realized I did actually, I didn't really know much about marketing and I didn't really know like even how to do it. So I'd love to kind of talk about how you've been able to, really build an amazing brand in your market and kind of like how that, how that transpired.
So if you wanna kind of take us back, how'd you do it?
Mark Ainley: Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll say to your comment [00:04:00] is if anything anyone listening here has as a competitive advantage is more than likely the other property managers in your town or city are not good at marketing. And it's maybe good or bad is not the right word, but it's more of focus. They just don't put the time and energy into it.
The whole departmentalizing sales and marketing was something that only stick ins started getting talked about at the PM Grow summits back in like 2018, '19. So, prior to that, like no one... It wasn't even, it wasn't even a phrase. So, I, I've always looked at marketing as my competitive advantage over everyone else in my market that's too busy to think about it.
And, and the other big competitive advantage is everyone else is always afraid to get on camera. So if you could just get on camera a little more and be a little less afraid, it, it goes so far of the business you're gonna attract or whatever your marketing department
will ultimately be built out as.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. No, I totally agree, and I think that's where I thought "Oh, if I just build up my Google reviews, I'm gonna get all the referrals." And, and I did. I actually got quite a few Google reviews. I was organically in the top three and I had the realtor [00:05:00] referrals. But really that wasn't marketing.
So do you wanna take us back? 'Cause you've had-- you've been in the business like, almost 23 years. So kinda how did you start, and did you, did you start all r- like back then or was this like 2017, '18
Mark Ainley: Yeah. So the reality of it is we started in 2003, and we were trying to be a brokerage company, and we never were. Definitely the word property management wasn't even like really a thing, and there wasn't even really property management companies back then, or at least in my market. And, and I definitely had no clue what NARPM was, that there's actually a whole world of property managers out there.
And, our, our goal was to sell houses and then... But we were selling a lot of houses to investors, and those investors started asking like: "Hey, man, you want to handle collecting the rent here? You want to be the landlord?" They'd-- I remember one guy asking me: "You want to be the landlord for me?"
The word property management wasn't even really even fully in ex-existence in people's vocabulary here, at least around here. And know, the first couple contracts we took were really more of a means to an end. I remember the first one, it's like: "All right, well, if that guy comes on at 50 bucks, I get a water cooler now for the office.
That'll cover that, and all I got to do is collect some [00:06:00] rent." No, the first one I took on, I remember the second day I got a call basically saying: "What the F? You took on Paul's property, but you didn't take on our property." Because it was somebody else that was kind of in the same circle that I...
I, I said no for, for it felt like a really long time, but you know, six months, a year of just saying: "No, we don't do that." Because going back even a couple years prior I, I bought my first investment property and I made all the, the horrible mistakes. I took the sad story as a single mom that I felt bad for because it, it related to, you know, my mom was single.
Like If someone she gave her a break, it's the same idea. And, it took partial security deposit and, it was horrible. I made every mistake that I, I speak to everybody not to do these days, and ultimately did file for eviction and did a modern day cash for keys. So at that point, I, I remember just like almost walking away like: "I'm done.
I'm just going to go buy properties and... or I'm just going to go and sell properties, sell these problems to other people. I'm not going to deal with that. I'll take the commission and, and that's how I'll make my money." And so I fought it for a while, of getting back into it. And, Leasing properties was really hard before the crash, at least here in the Midwest, because you could literally [00:07:00] buy a property with less of a down payment than you could a security deposit. We all hear the stories of buying a property and walking away. And actually I, I remember like having...
Like I'd write it in the contract, so I'd try walking away $10,000, $12,000, $13,000 from these properties I was buying. They're all investors, investments, but the owner occupants could do the same thing with these 80/20 loans. So it was really hard to actually even lease up properties. And rents were really low, so if you were doing a percentage of a management fee that was kind of, tough to...
You're charging people 12%, 13%, so it turned into a flat fee. But, uh market crash, we started investing, between '08 and '18. Bought damn near 500 units, rehabbed them, fixed them sold some of them, kept the management. But did all that. But in the meantime, the property management company kept growing.
And I remember it was a day in 2014, and my partner's we were, we hired a couple people along the way and, we're just kinda growing in the background as we're doing all these rehabs. And my partner's it's, it's every- everyone's pissed and everyone's, everyone's frustrated, everyone's overwhelmed.
What's going on?" I'm like, "Brian, man we manage 250 units and a half a million square feet of commercial space, That was right when I learned about process.
Stacey Salyer: Uh-huh.
Mark Ainley: process in [00:08:00] place. We don't have anything documented and, And I remember that was kinda like the moment where wow, we, we kinda have a company here and, and we should probably do something with that.
And, and I remember it, it was uh, week before or a week later, I, I googled up property management in the town we were in, and the only company that came up was a real estate broker in my
office doing property
management on the side that I didn't even know about.
So,
Stacey Salyer: my God. That's amazing. So here you are, you have an actual company, and then you have a, a real estate agent in your office, like just side, side hustling it
Mark Ainley: Yep. Yep. And, and so I'm like, "Oh, man, like if..." So that was like my first hint of like, all right, if we could do what we did here without even doing any marketing, wow, th-there's, there's pretty big opportunity. So, fast-forward, three, four years, we kinda, you know, went through a whole bunch of different process type classes and, coaches and stuff like that, just trying to get things in place.
Built a GC bible of all the processes. Started training people and, and so forth. So, uh, went through that, kinda that iteration. Discovered... The funny thing is, the guy in my office doing property management, he's the one that actually referred me to NARPM at, at some point in that, that journey.
And got [00:09:00] involved in NARPM. Never really did anything with NARPM and, paid the 250 bucks, never did anything with it. Threw the logo on our website where, when we got BMW and all that stuff, but didn't really do anything with that. And it was, it was about 2017, we were reviewing kind of what we're doing on the development side and we said, are getting competitive, which b-based on today is crazy.
It's harder to get some of these contractors down to these neighborhoods that we're investing in. Maybe, maybe our ROI is much better on the property management side if we, we continue to grow that. So we went back 2018, really full-time to the property management company.
Went from, we doubled three times basically since then. We had to go back and clean up a bunch of stuff, starting with I think when we did this in 2018, we made everyone sign brand new management agreements 'cause we had... It was some crazy like 56 different property management agreements.
Everyone if you want to red line my management agreement, I'm like, "Cool, that's good. That's fine. That's fine. Just, just sign. Like initial this over here." And it was a mess. It, it was everything that made it impossible to scale and, and we unwound all that. And, right around that time, we realized how cheap we were, if you're gonna account for our time and everything we were giving.
So had it, went through that whole drill of, if we raise prices, everyone's gonna fire us. [00:10:00] And, went through, we, we've raised price on everyone and only a couple people fired us, which were the two people that we wanted to fire us. We were very grateful and you know how that goes.
you take six months to send it out, that new management agreement, and six hours later you're like, "Oh shit, no one even cares. No one even notices." So, just kinda continued on and growing and into the path we're at. And it was around 2019 where I, I said half sad, half laughing, but, our partners came together like, "Mark, you just gotta get out of the operations side of things if we wanna scale this."
and a lot of it was I just cared so much about customer service and, and to solve a problem, I would create five other problems in the organization and break processes and all that. So like, go figure out the sales and marketing thing," a-and that's ultimately how I came in there. Now, I'll tell you the truth the first year after I got booted, I kinda looked for like a silver bullet of "All right, who can I call and hire?"
And we're talking to J-Jordan Welu and stuff like that, like who will come in and, property management marketing in a box type stuff. So, but yeah, that was kind of our journey into
that and, and it's kind of evolved since.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. And so, I mean, you obviously have your podcast, and I know that's like highly rated and it's very popular and you've done other marketing, but [00:11:00] how did you get started? Did you like go to any classes? I, I think when we were talking offline, you mentioned Hormozi. So yeah, I'd love to know kind of more about that
Mark Ainley: Yeah, I, I mean, unlike when we started the property management business, there's so much online. I mean, there's even more online. There's so many... If anything, the bigger problem now is like what's crap and what's good online. But I, I didn't have to guess anymore. I actually could, read the books and...
But along the way, when I was looking for that silver bullet, I just started doing the thing. I just started going after the Google reviews. And to me, in my mind, I'm still like this, is "All right, how can I get enough Google reviews to stay f- so far ahead that anyone that starts a business tomorrow won't wanna try catching up?
Or it'll be a deterrent to them wanting to compete." Even th- my colleagues, like, all right we have 10 times more, what's gonna s- I don't want them to say, "I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and beat Mark 'cause they're too far ahead." and then I started, just, Googling us and, and figuring out our, our, our reputation and, and started trying to figure out how I could get interviewed more.
And y- I just started doing the thing of, all right, how c- what, what does this look like? And, and ultimately it turned into... 'cause I started off with man, you, you gotta spend [00:12:00] money on marketing, and you might not know if you're gonna get a return on it, or you're not sure if that guy that called is even from that $10,000 campaign you just spent.
So that always frustrated me about marketing. But what that forced us to do is be very guerrilla marketing approach. Just do more volume. If you look at our marketing budget even today for 2026, I think our marketing budget, when you back out labor, is only like 75, $80,000.
And a lot of it is manpower and emails and reps
and, and so forth. So,
Stacey Salyer: okay. So now, now, I'm sure somebody listening to this, especially those that, I mean, that don't do any sort of like purposeful marketing, just heard you say our budget is only 75 or $80,000. Is that correct? For this year? So I'm sure mo- most people listening are like, "Wait, what? He said $75,000 is his budget for marketing?"
So tell, could you, mind breaking down like what exactly that entails? Like what, what does that go to?
Mark Ainley: Yeah, it's not even that much it's not even that cra- So, we, we are, PMW is a partner we've [00:13:00] worked with for a long time, and we're in their Market Leader, I think is what you call it, program. So, a, a chunk of that goes to that. We spend one of our largest paid channels is just doing Google ads, which we're doing right now with Geek Leads.
But a- and then you have all these different supporting, propernation.com, just all, all these different kinda pay-to-play things. But that's not where a lot of our, our juice comes from. A lot of our juice comes from the SEO side and now more than ever it's just how, how do we g- what do we gotta do?
What do we gotta put out there to be found through different element searches? So a lot of that ends up being just spending X amount of hours a week figuring out what the best content is to put out there that's actually interesting, and then figuring out how to distribute that 100 different ways.
So, but again, that's not the expensive part. And s- but that $75,000 ends up being, all right, $700 a month for MailChimp because we need a way to get the stuff out there. It ends up being we have a couple editors that just make sure they edit our stuff. That's less of an issue now these days.
But but it ends up just being these tools for trying to create this content and get it out there. The, the services that create the the clips from the podcast and so forth. So, [00:14:00] a, a lot of the spend ends up being just kinda
supporting the, the guerrilla efforts.
Stacey Salyer: Right. Right. Okay. And so do you mind kind of like breaking down like, so you, sounds like you're probably doing a newsletter. I mean, obviously you have a podcast. Are you using social media, like all the different platforms? Or what, like kind of what, what are you doing, if you don't mind
Mark Ainley: Yeah, no, for sure. And, and I, I know if I was listening to this, I'd be curious what my team is made up of. So I-I'm in charge of sales and marketing, and on my team is my BDM, which really has nothing to do with marketing. I have a onboarding property manager that basically carries them through the first 60 days, almost like a, a white glove service.
I have an onboarding remote team member and I-- and on the marketing side, I have a remote team member, Javier, who's in Mexico City. He's been with me for five years. And I just hired literally this week I, I keep calling him a local Javier. So, a marketing guy here that, that's boots on the ground here.
So that's my team. But up until this point, it, it was really just me and Javier that's done all, all of this on the marketing side. So me and one RTM, which my [00:15:00] point of bringing that up is you don't need a massive marketing team to be effective.
You
just need to make sure you're effective.
Stacey Salyer: Right. Do it. Do it.
Yeah. So how did you
know kind of what to start with or did you just kind of like shotgun the approach
Mark Ainley: had no clue. I had no clue. So th-there's, A-and I think it, it re-really was finding my own style or my comfort level of, of how we want to approach things. and, and I think that's unique for everybody. So, we're very heavy... There's two things we got going for us in our market when it comes to us property management.
It's one, it's very heavy investor,
it's very heavy regulated. You, you can appreciate that from where you're
Stacey Salyer: Yes, I can. Coming from Washington State, absolutely.
Mark Ainley: So those two create unlimited amounts of content that you could, you could crank out. This weekend we, we put out five articles, and four of them had to do with regulation.
The fifth one was, we tied some article to World Cup how we passed on it here in Chicago was a benefit to real estate investors for all the tax money that was spent. but we have unlimited content for this, so, so it's huge.
So any, anyone here in the Midwest just or even the Southeast just has [00:16:00] so much content you can create, and us just being able to crank that out. And I think it was, call to, to Pablo here. It was a couple years ago. I met him at the original conference at Amelia Island, and coincidentally, he had a client up here in Chicago that it all kinda just came together perfectly.
I had him on our podcast. He was gonna work an event for them, and we all, we kinda came together and it worked out good. And he brought me as a gift when he, he came up to Chicago what's, what's his name? What's the, the marketer? His favorite guy. Drawing a blank. A little short guy from New Jersey that loves the
Jets.
Stacey Salyer: I won't, I won't remember. I'm
Mark Ainley: Vanicek. Vanicek.
Stacey Salyer: I'm gonna check. Oh, Gary
Mark Ainley: Gary Vee. Yeah, Gary Vee
Stacey Salyer: Oh, yeah, Gary Vee. Everybody loves
Gary Vee. and I, Yeah, I just love that Gary Vee drops the F-bomb all the time. I'm like, I-
aspire to be that.
Mark Ainley: So yeah, no, so I, I do too. I'm, I'm always... But I'm always the one left out of
our podcast, the only guy swearing, so then I just look like the, the raw
Stacey Salyer: I know. Same. Yeah.
Mark Ainley: But he brought, he brought a book, and I never-- Gary Vee's just, in popular culture out there. But I read his book and I started following him online and, and something that hit me with Gary Vee is everything's [00:17:00] free.
So you, you could put the effort into putting one article together, making one six-minute video, and then y- it's unlimited. You could publish it 80 different ways on 100 different site. Like it's, it's crazy. And that was what hit me is oh, okay. And then, then it's like you have this email list.
Like you could, you could bombard them four times a week. Y- I, I started then.
I also signed up to Neil Patel, who's a, a marketer that I, I like
Stacey Salyer: Oh, yeah. I follow. Neera Patel too. Mm-hmm
Mark Ainley: and he does bigger business, but the one thing I realized with him is he sends me an email every damn day, and I'm actually interested in it.
And I realized, I'm like, man, we have such a benefit in real estate that real estate's pretty sexy. If you sold tires or windshield wipers, like you can't bombard your clients every day with, tire tread emails. But you can with real estate and investing and what's going on in the market and what's happening in your neighborhood and leasing and, and all that stuff.
There's just so many different angles and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna start email people, more frequently. And if people start opting out, then I know I'm emailing too much. So,
We, we now email four times a week.
Stacey Salyer: Do you really? Okay
Mark Ainley: we're, we email four times a week, plus our LeadSimple, we're hitting them every five days.
So [00:18:00] we, we sent out a million just over a million emails last month, so a
Stacey Salyer: Okay.
Mark Ainley: And I know that only because I
got the notice from MailChimp that we had to go to a different plan because of it.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Okay. So I wanna, I wanna repeat that for all the PMC owners listening. You email people four times a week, plus then you have people on your drip campaign for like through LeadSimple for like prospective new clients?
Mark Ainley: go every five days which some of the-- all those people are also on the MailChimp. So the people in our LeadSimple, the, the people that have hope or haven't opted out, they end up getting basically five emails a week. Now if I was listening, I'd be curious on what those five emails are, right?
So on Mon- on Tuesday and Saturday, it's just basically an email that makes it look like it's coming from me. Just a very... It's, it's not formatted. It, it just looks like a general email. My goal is to make it look like a personalized email as much as possible, and it ties back to some, some sort of article we wrote or a podcast episode that we did that hopefully is something they'd be interested in.
And then on Thursday, we send out the email of the new podcast that dropped. So every Thursday we have a new episode to drop. And on Monday, we then [00:19:00] send out an email of the week before of everything you missed last week. So it's the new articles, the... So it's basically one another... It's a formatted MailChimp where it's the podcast, the...
We, we do another live show. I do it with Tim Harstad,
another private mentor I think you know. He was at the dinner with us that one night. So we do a Chicago Landlord Secrets every Thursday or Friday, we, we record it. So that recording and then whatever articles and then obviously a tie-in to maybe, refer us or, or if you want rental analysis tool, that's our biggest tool to kinda get people to jump in.
But that, that's what we do. So it ends up... That, that's... You do it four times a week and... Now, the other thing is, is our email list. We have about 40,000 people on that list, and that list is made up of a couple things. It's, it's everyone that's came through LeadSimple through both podcast giveaways or, or, or GC giveaways.
That is a mix of then I have a couple real estate brokers we swap email lists on. And then we... There's a tool out there, and maybe we can put it in the show notes, but there's a tool out there that you could go and scrape Instagram for emails. So there's a couple of [00:20:00] people, with 40,000, 50,000 followers here in Chicago that I just know these people are real estate investors, so...
And you can scrape them and not everyone has an email tied to their Instagram account, but you get the ones that, that do it and it was relatively inexpensive. And then the other thing we just started doing is every Friday, we pull every new listing in the Chicago metro area, and there's usually about 4,000 listings.
And we take the little MLS short, anyone that's a realtor you know you could pull the, the different template, and you print it to a PDF. It might be 200, 300 pages or whatever, and then just throw it in Claude and say, "Please pull out the email the emails on that." Now, we get 400 or 500 new emails for new agents listing a, a week.
So, that, that's just another way we add it. So the-- we, we're pretty lucky here in Chicago. We have 22,000, 23,000 real estate agents, which is another
bulk chunk of that list as well too.
Stacey Salyer: Wow. That's impressive. That's a really big email list. And I think a lot of-- Again, I didn't even realize this in property management but now I do, 'cause I basically consider my business as like online B2B, and so my business is my email list, right? And [00:21:00] yeah, the marketing piece, I mean, I'm, I'm only sending out like two emails a week unless I'm running some sort of campaign, then I'll send out a few extras.
But yeah, that's awesome. Four emails plus the LeadSimple. That's really impressive. So
Mark Ainley: I, do-- it's all in advance though. So for the overwhelm, so it's, it ends up being I'll, I'll do two months worth of emails upfront based on the content I created the previous two months. So it's, it's not like... It, it's somewhat evergreen content or at least relative content within the, the previous six months, but then you're done.
Same with Elite Simple. You add two or three months worth of, of relevant content and then you're, you're done. It, it's just kind of set and forget. So it's not every week I'm, I'm sitting there like, " "Oh no, it's Thursday. I didn't get these four y-" Like it, it's all pre-planned in that sense. Now, everything I'm saying, I make it sound so easy.
It took me five, six years to get to this point to realize how easy this could be. So, a- anyone listening, if anything there's so much stuff I learned along the way that just, I, I have a, I did something with with Jerry Pound one time. It was in, I think this recording's still available on Crane I think, or something like that.
But it's 18 lessons in eight years or something
like that. But it was
everything of if I [00:22:00] had to start over type question
Stacey Salyer: Right. Right. Yeah, I think it's important too to highlight, you start-- usually most people start with one thing and then, you add a few more layers and then it just keeps compounding right, over time. And then that, and then it just becomes consistent. So are you doing all the writing yourself or do you have your team also help you or are you mostly just using Claude with your
Mark Ainley: I, use Claude and then but it's, it's-- I, I think what's so important is there's obviously the body, the message of it, but what's important to me is the tone comes from me, which totally contradicts what we talk about of, of being the, the, the front, the face of the company. But right now that, that's kind of where we're at and, and I have a tone, people are familiar with my tone through the podcast and just other, just my network.
So as long as it's from my tone and, and it's referring to something that we want, it, it's pretty easy to kinda create, you
know, a few months' worth of
emails in, in a few hours. In a couple hours even.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. Okay. So I mean, obviously you've had, you've built a really good foundation, solid foundation on your brand. You're at, how many doors are you [00:23:00] managing about?
Mark Ainley: 1,500,
Stacey Salyer: 1,500, okay, which is a very, that's very sizable company. And do you have specific growth goals?
Mark Ainley: Yes. Our BHAG is 10,000 doors in 10
Stacey Salyer: 10,000? Okay.
Mark Ainley: and I think we're seven years into it. I, I just wanna keep growing. It, it's funny, as entrepreneur, you're like, "I don't care, just grow." And, and like, when everyone's "You gotta put on paper what you wanna grow to," it's like, "All right, listen, we'll put 10,000 there, but if we get to...
If, if we get 7,500 out
of it, like I'll-- I'm just as happy." '
So,
Stacey Salyer: yeah, it's funny when I meet with people cause they're Like, "I just wanna, I just wanna grow," and they'll, and they'll throw out a number like 10,000. I'm like, "Well, how'd you come up with that number?" It's "I don't know, it just sounded good." I'm like, "Okay, that's cool."
Mark Ainley: I think it ends up for us I, I, I think that way, but ultimately if I'm gonna plan and, and, as far as leads and backing into... You know what? When you, you have 1,500 doors, if we have a, a 10% churn, which is a little higher than that, you gotta get 200 doors just to break even.
So, do I have enough leads to get 200 doors and keep e-even growing on top of that? So that becomes the, the challenge that a lot of [00:24:00] people start not be able to hit the break-even point. And all these roll-ups I think have felt that pain of like, all right, you got 13,000 units, and if you have 10% churn, which most of them have higher than that, you, you gotta bring on 2,600 doors
just to break even.
Stacey Salyer: Yep. Yep. That is definitely a math game for sure. I know I Ian Joseph and I talked about that when he was on my show and kind of how that it kind of becomes that double-edged sword when you're out acquiring, because now all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, now I need to either, bring them on door by door or acquire just to stay net," bigger amount.
So are you looking at also acquiring? I mean, do you feel like by building a really strong brand in your market, you think you'd be able to go out and convince somebody to sell their book of business to you?
Mark Ainley: Yeah. Like I was telling you before, we've had a couple people approach us and they end up being just not profitable enough where we are a-as a company, and I think this is important for anyone out there, is we're, we're probably one of the more expensive companies in Chicago. Now that just means that we have to add more value to the clients and they have to feel safer.
And I, I have vendors I do business with, it's "I know you're a little more, [00:25:00] but I know I trust you're gonna get it done." Same concept. So having being able to do that i-is something that, that kind of helps that game. But when I go to acquire somebody or look at somebody and they're not at that point, some of these companies we look at buying, we'd have to double their their, their clients' RPU just to get it close to what our, our average might be.
And ultimately when you go to buy, then as then you just have that churn risk after a
year or within a
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. Yeah, and that, that is important. Have you guys kind of worked out like a, what I call the buy box as far as what you are looking for to buy or?
Mark Ainley: Yeah definitely. And if anything, what I've been working with some... we have, we don't have NARPM here in Chicago, and we have I started a group just Chicago property managers, and we call it Best Practice Group. But there's about 25 of us in there, and we meet once a month and do similar things that NARPM meetups would do.
But if anything, my mindset is always like any of these people I could be merging with or buying with. It, that's kind of my goal of when we meet and trying to add value, 'cause we're all [00:26:00] competitors i-in a way. Now, the one benefit is we're a huge market and some of us have our own little niches inside the market, which actually makes us good referral partners.
But a handful of us are all direct competitors. We literally share best practices on here, and then we turn around and we compete on a, on a deal down the street. So, but when I'm, when I am talking to them and giving them value or information, it, it's one, to raise the whole bar of the industry here in Chicago.
And then at the same time, if you start charging that fee, then that makes you more profitable and, and then hopefully someday if we're gonna buy you, it, it'll give us more of the opportunity to buy you,
so.
Stacey Salyer: Yep. Yeah. No, I love that.
Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that's a good strategy for sure. I mean, the better we can make the industry for all, for sure, and then, yeah, and then you could be a future acquisition. And it'd be better acquisition than those that aren't charging enough and
Mark Ainley: that's how the NARPM accounting standards really kinda came to place. It's "Hey, we gotta make sure if we could all do better and track our numbers w- better and know if we're profitable or not, we, we can all help each other buy, sell, and, and and,
merge."
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, absolutely. That's cool. So I know you've talked a lot about like kind of how you built your brand. I mean, [00:27:00] it's, it's huge. Your podcast I know has a great following. So what are you kind of working on for future? 'Cause you wanna grow to 10,000 doors, which would definitely, that's gonna change your company and change probably your role and everybody else's.
And then for you, everybody's building their business to sell. I mean, 'cause we're not gonna be able to have it forever. So what do you kind of see for your future goals, like for that, for your brand?
Mark Ainley: Well, I, I think you mentioned I, I went to that Alex Hormozi thing a couple years ago, and, and a big talk about that was he was talking about risks that companies have or, or what makes them valuable at an enterprise value, total speak. And the, the big thing that kinda I took home from that was really the, the key man risk.
And, and the weird thing is the key man risk that we have in this company isn't even really probably operational. We actually... my partner and CEO, Cliff, like no, no one really knows him. He doesn't talk to owners. He's definitely not generating referrals or anything like that.
So, we're covered on that somewhat. But then it ends up being the face of the company. And I think what I realized here in the last six months was I don't know if I could [00:28:00] redo- if, especially if I'm talking about do more, do more, do more. I don't think I could take my face off
more, but what I could do is get other people involved and start getting other people on camera.
I might do the same amount of reps, but now if someone else is doing 20% of the reps I'm doing now, that's a little... And kinda do that in baby steps over the next couple of years of how do I pull myself out of that. And I, I think with the podcast and all that stuff, like they'll be me until it's not, I guess.
And I think that'll be one of those things that just the podcast won't exist then at some point. So, just trying to figure out how to have less key man risk of that. Now, I don't think people hire or fire us based on me or do my marketing, but there's a perception there to any buyer that comes in.
And, and we went through a drill last year. We had-- We looked at a, a company that was looking to potentially buy us. And, I think as an operator, you, you kinda entertain those conversations every so often, more so just to kinda understand the environment. I'm sure you can speak to that more than I can.
But going through that, there's still that perception of "Oh, well, if, if Mark leaves, he's got a following," or people listen to his podcast and hire... So there ends up being a perception more so than actually a [00:29:00] reality to that. I have to just kinda play with that in the upcoming years of figuring out how to make sure
that's not gonna hurt us financially someday when we choose to exit.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. No, I th- I think you're onto something for sure. I mean, you've built a great brand and you have, way more marketing than probably 99.9% of most property management companies in the US. But I can see, where because you've built that, then maybe starting to incorporate other key team members and just kind of make it more of a collective more about the company versus you specifically would probably be good and probably make you way more valuable.
In fact, I mean, probably way more valuable than your competitors
Mark Ainley: Yeah, and, I've gotten away, I say gotten away with it 'cause I do think we run pretty lean. Having just a remote team member is really... I mean, he, he's helped-- he, he's done everything to get me to this point with me. And I, I think the person local here now being able to get, it's not me going around and taking videos of everyone else in the office or getting someone to say something in a testimonial or a client comes in and kind of throwing them off in the corner and, and getting some feedback from them.
I, I think him being around the office will [00:30:00] help us even just for down from doing the aerial footage of our office to put on our website that's no longer Mark's space. So just stuff like that, it was kind of my thought process of one of the many benefits of actually
investing in having somebody local.
Stacey Salyer: That's cool. And so do you have team members who are willing to get on camera with you?
Mark Ainley: Yeah. I, I don't know if they're necessarily because they want to or 'cause they, they, they think their job depends on it. I don't, I wouldn't say anything like that, but I, I have some of them that will. So a- and like anything, the people that, that are willing to, you push them to do more than, than the other people that they don't have to.
Similar to AI right now. You got plenty of people that want more AI, and you got other people that are like, "Ah." So I've just pushed the people that, that wanna do more with AI
to, to kind of help them leverage their own skills.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. No, that's cool. Yeah, I think, It's a hard first step, I think, 'cause I know even back when I started creating the talking head videos, right? Oh my God. I was like, oh, it was painful to edit them and, now it's like I don't even care, and now I just, in fact, I-- Well, I was in Arizona last week with Jen Ruleans, Hold It With PM Jen, and uh, it literally is natural to us [00:31:00] now, where we're like, "Okay, we're out to dinner. Let's set up our phone. We need to record ourselves drinking and eating." I mean, that, that's literally now kind of like where our brain goes.
And yeah, it's just after time, you just kinda get used to it, right?
Mark Ainley: Well, I, I think for me personally, it was no one else really cares that you're doing it or that you're not doing or you're doing it. And if you don't do it, it's not gonna help you. If you do do it, there's a good chance it could help you. So that's been kind of my... And that could go for anybody, like I, I think the hardest thing that people go through is actually, one, there's kind of the, the two iterations. There's actually getting in front of the camera and then it goes then hitting submit or, post.
Stacey Salyer: Yes
Mark Ainley: And those two, if you can close the gap on that where, now it becomes shorter.
I, I remember I, I hired somebody a couple years... I started my own like personal Instagram page 'cause I realized one thing that was bothering me was like our GC page, like it sucked. It was a bunch of Canvas like of no one cared about like. so I'm like, "All right. We, we need some interaction." And, and I open a page and I threw a video out there and it got on first post, more likes than the last two [00:32:00] years worth of Canva posts on GC.
I'm like, "Okay, there's something here." So I'm like, " That was a pain in the butt. That was horrible for me to do to get that recorded and posted, so I'll hire somebody. I hired somebody and, and they, I was confident what they could do, their skills, but they just were too expensive and it wasn't s- wasn't scalable for me.
It was, it was way too much money. And it wasn't till one day I had a guy who's probably 10 years younger than me came in, did the podcast with us, took a couple pictures in, in the podcast room and, and then literally through to, and he was on Instagram like in, in 30 seconds. I'm like, "Man, I pay someone like 200 bucks a post like almost if you really break it down to do that."
And that afternoon I went and, and said, "Hey, listen. I'm, I'm putting my notice in, like I'm gonna figure this out myself." but it was like I record stuff and I have to send it to her, and then she send it back and then she like for approval. I was like, "Nah, no, we can't do this.
We need to reduce the friction of content and posting it." So-
Stacey Salyer: That's cool. So are you doing your own social media then? You're handling it on your own?
Mark Ainley: for my page for the most part I, I do, and then I collaborate with the other pages and Instagram... I'm sorry, and then LinkedIn, I, I've been doing most of that stuff on there as well too. But I, I just kinda like doing that, and I kind have a system. I like the whole-- [00:33:00] Ev-every morning I, I-- Part of my morning routine after the gym is I do my Duolingo which I'm on day like 920 for Spanish and I, I, I...
Stacey Salyer: Congrats
Mark Ainley: ask me to say anything. And then I post something to Instagram, which goes to Facebook, and then I, I copy it to TikTok and so that's like my daily post for the day that I get out
there ear- right and early on personalized, so
Stacey Salyer: Yep. Yeah, same. I, I actually do all my own social media as well. I just find it kinda easier, and I I just do it when I'm feeling creative. Sometimes I'll pre-do quite a few, and I'll schedule them and do it, or sometimes it might just be every day. But yeah, and then same on LinkedIn. I'll get on and just do my own.
Awesome. Well, yeah, th- I think this was really helpful, and I think, I do like to have a variety of people on my show to kinda talk about like how they built their business, like what their plans are. I think you have a really unique thing in your market as far as building your business and, especially like building it as an asset.
I think you're on the right track for sure as far as, incorporating your entire team or company into the marketing as you grow. [00:34:00] What else do you have going on that you'd like to share before we wrap up?
Mark Ainley: Well, like I, like I said, I, I always I try to run the company as we're always looking to buy someone or we might always get bought. So if you kinda keep that mindset, you, you keep some of your priorities straight and I think the marketing side of things can be done very lean.
So a-anyone that thinks they don't got the budget, either A, you do, or B, maybe you gotta charge a little more like we had to go back and, and do to some of our clients, so.
Stacey Salyer: That's cool. Well, yeah. Well, hopefully everyone listening today took at least one thing away from this, and I would say, even Mark, I'm sure you'd agree to this just start with one, one thing, one platform. And then just keep going. Keep building, right?
Mark Ainley: Yeah, for sure. And, and so much of that, that even if you're doing one platform it's all duplicatable. I mean, if you really look across our stuff you see a lot of the same stuff, the same, really end goal or same call to action. It's just put in different ways in different places.
So, you don't have to post on seven different socials, you don't have to create seven different pieces of content. You really have one, and then two weeks later, use the same piece again. So, it, it's super doable. Just takes someone to guide it, so. [00:35:00] And, and the other thing, there's so much help remotely now that have experience.
I, I come across people all the time when we're looking for other roles in the company. Sometimes I'll help out in the our recruiting department for remote talent. And there's so many people that have
fairly good marketing skills
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah, no, that's really great advice for sure. So yeah, thank you for sharing. Well, is there anything... i'd love to shout out your podcast so people can follow if they aren't already. So what, what is the name of it? Where do we find you?
Mark Ainley: All right, straightupchicagoinvestor.com. And if anybody, if you want to go on my website and you download a rental analysis or something like that, you put your information in. And not 'cause I wanna give you that tool, but now you can just get everything. You can at least see what we're doing in your inbox, and you can see exactly what we're doing.
And if you think it's, it's good, then copy it. Everything I
do is, everything's copied.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, Yeah, and that's awesome. That's, that's a very, that is a gift that you're giving to all the people listening. So yeah. And all your information will be in the show notes, so if you go to your website, yeah, do a download of some sort, then you're gonna be on the email list, and then you can see [00:36:00] here's what goes out.
Take a look at it. Make, tailor something to your own self and your market, and there you go. Now you're in the step in the right direction. So well, thank you again for coming on my show. I really, really appreciate it. Everybody go listen to Straight Up Investor Chicago.
Mark Ainley: Straight Up Chicago Investor.
Stacey Salyer: Straight up Chicago
Investor. And,
Mark Ainley: get the same Google results either way, so
Stacey Salyer: Okay, good. Okay, good. Yeah, good. I to- I'm glad I didn't totally butcher it for you. Yeah, and thank you so much for your time today, and I really appreciate you
Mark Ainley: Ah, I love what you're doing for this industry, so it's a pleasure to be on here. I appreciate you inviting me
Stacey Salyer: All right. All right. Well, we'll talk to you soon. All right. Thanks everyone
Mark Ainley: Thanks, guys
Outro: Thanks for listening to the Stacey Salyer show. Here's the deal. You can read about acquisitions anywhere, but you can't learn acquisitions from someone who's done it the way I have as a buyer, a seller, and from the corporate side evaluating hundreds of companies. That's why I need you to subscribe and share this with someone in your network who needs to hear it.[00:37:00]
And if this episode landed, leave a five star review. It's how more PM owners find the only acquisition expertise in the space that comes from all sides of the table. And while you're at it, grab my Acquisition Readiness checklist on my website at staceysalyer.com. Then when you're ready to move from Growth Thinking to Growth Building, explore the Built to Acquire program.
Don't leave it on the table. See you on the next episode.
