Jason Hull on Real Estate Advertising in the AI Era and the Human Advantage

Host 00:00

In that moment, I broke down. I had tears. I was crying in front of the entire realm.

Host1 00:04

You've re ramped 322 companies. It's no easy feat.

Host 00:07

I've been teaching you that for years. AI is going to create a human gap. It is such a beautiful business strategy that people just overlook. If people aren't taking the action, getting the results that you need, they just don't have enough belief in themselves.

Host1 00:24

Like they just go really deep into relationship using that giftology framework.

Host 00:28

Most significant thing that you could do is focus on depth, not width.

Host1 00:32

What's up, everybody? Grant Wise. Welcome back to the Partner Profit Podcast, the show where we teach you how to turn your relationships into revenue. Today, I have a guest that I think can teach us how to do that, Mr. Jason Hull. Man, Jason, thanks so much for being with me today.

Host 00:46

Grant, awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

Host1 00:48

Yeah, for people that maybe don't know much about you, give us a little bit of the backstory. How'd you get to where you are today?

Host 00:52

Oh man, a little backstory. So, well, I am the world's leading property management coach and consultant. And the backstory is I've never had a property management business ever. And I somehow stumbled into this industry and uh happened to be really good at helping entrepreneurs grow. But yeah, the backstory is I started a web design business back in 2008 and um struggled a lot and eventually realized I didn't like the clients that I was working with. I didn't like being micromanaged by people, I didn't like what I was doing. And then um I came across, you know, just this idea of Simon Senec of starting with why. And I was like, what's my why? And so I went down this rabbit hole figuring that out and figuring out what my purpose was. And then I was like, I changed everything. I'm like, I only want to work with these type of clients and want to have this type of team, and I changed everything in my business, and then I was a lot happier, ironically. So yeah, but yeah, I I'm a dad, I've got four kids, I've made tons of mistakes in life that have helped me to learn and figure stuff out. I joke that my business door grow was built on thousands of mistakes, and um, now we're the world leaders at coaching property management companies and helping them scale their businesses, and and uh there you go.

Host1 02:17

How how did you land in the property management sector with if that wasn't really your core thing?

Host 02:22

So the way I got into it is I had started this web design business. My brother had bought into a property management franchise. He was fresh out of college. Him and his one of his best friends, his best friend, decided to buy this property management franchise. They had no doors, they didn't know what they were doing, probably in the beginning. And uh they got a website from corporate, and he was like, Hey, here's this website from corporate, but I don't like it. I'm like, cool, make these changes, do this, and I gave him some ideas because my degree and background was marketing. And I was like, This who's your target audience? And this doesn't make sense. Why is pay rent the most significant call to action? Do you need more tenants? And he's like, No, I want owners, I want people that own property. I'm like, well, okay, this doesn't make sense then. Like, change do this. So he's like, Well, I made some of the changes you said, but can you just build me a new one? Can you just do one from scratch? And I was like, Okay. So I rebuilt, I built him a new website based on the best stuff I knew at the time, and um, it was a lot better than pretty much anything else out there. And then a lot of his fellow franchisees, some of which had thousands of doors, wanted what he had. And so then I started doing property management websites. That wasn't back then, that wasn't the only type of websites. I was getting any website project I could try to find, right? Local businesses and whatever. And some projects were cool and some were nightmares. And you know, I learned things like scope creep and content delay and all these problems that you deal with in that industry. But I learned to understand the property management industry really well. And eventually it shifted more into instead of just figuring out what they needed for a website, which they wanted to grow, it started turning into coaching. Like this is what you need to do, and what I've seen others that are successful doing. And then eventually we were ranked nationally for property management web design. And then eventually I was rebranding property management companies because the a big problem was they were branded as a real estate company and they had a lot of leaks. And so I started this program where I would clean up their businesses and eventually re-ate our own dog food and rebranded as DoorGrow and started focusing on that niche.

Host1 04:30

Not a lot of people know what that means, the dog fooding um reference. Can you can you define that for people?

Host 04:36

So, one of our key products is that we're kind of like bar rescue for property managers. We clean up and optimize their business. And so we are rebranding them, rolling out a whole new pricing model. We're redoing their website, their sales pitch. The actual product we in property management we call purpose. It's people don't buy property management, they they buy safety and security and the person at the helm and the decisions they make, right? And so most property managers are selling the wrong product. That's probably true in most businesses and most industries. When their product is a vehicle to get people what they want, then that product isn't the actual product, right? And so our clients are the actual product and they they are trying to sell something people don't even want property management. No, no investor wakes up in the morning and goes, I'm so excited to buy property management today. It's just not how they're thinking. So, anyway, so we built this rapid revamp program that like rehabs their business and the side effect of it, when I've the first iteration of it I created, we were actually trying to get marketing clients because we'd do the website and then we do Google Ads and stuff like this. It actually cannibalized our marketing because it was so effective at optimizing their the leaks in their sales pipeline to help them facilitate more deals. It would sometimes doubling the amount of deals they were closing without changing their lead generation. So they're like, I don't need leads. And I was like, wait a sec, I built this because you were a really terrible client for lead gen because you had so many problems. I fixed the problems, now you don't want it. And so I was like, we need to change what our offering is. And so then we shifted more into coaching and revamping businesses, and uh, we've just gotten better and better at that. We've rebranded over 322 companies last I checked. So we're the nobody's done more than that in this industry than us. Like it um, and we've coached and we re innovate on pricing. We um yeah, we've just we changed these businesses dramatically.

Host1 06:39

So we talk about turning your relationships into revenue in this situation. Sounds like the relationship with your brother kind of kicked off this amazing business that you guys have got. But when you think about that, yeah, you know, turning your relationships into revenue, getting to a place where you know you've re-ramped 322 companies, that's no easy feat. I would imagine it took a lot of relationships, but kind of walk me through that. When I when I say, Jason, how do I turn my relationships into revenue? What comes to mind for you?

Host 07:08

I think this is going to be even bigger and more important with AI. AI is going to create a human gap, like a need for human connection and real connection. And um, and we're waking up suddenly in this world in the middle of this AI revolution of AI slop. We don't even know it's real anymore. Because of AI, it is so easy to create anything. So content creation is just through the roof. And so, what I think is going to happen, because it just to me seems like it has to, there's going to be a dramatic shift towards what is real. And there's probably going to have to be some sort of verification of what is actually a real person. This video was created by a real person, somebody's going to come up with that and I'll go along with it. But I think that's that human interaction, especially I think human to human in-person interaction, is going to be even more valuable and is going to be even more of a premium thing and even more important. So, for example, one of the things we do with every new client that has dramatically increased their results, decreased churn in a coaching business, which is usually a high churn business, is we onboard every new client in person. We have a monthly in-person meeting, they come out and we go deep and we get to know their business and they recognize I'm real. Because I realized that everything that was done via just Zoom calls and coach like videos in our platform. There's something I've noticed about people's brains that we do not perceive this video, internet, whatever, as real life. It's not real. I I had had clients for like a year coach them on things, met with them, and then they come out to our conference that we would do annually after maybe a year or maybe even two years, and I would teach the same thing. And then they would come up to me like, oh my gosh, you blew my mind. I had this breakthrough. This is amazing. I'm like, what was it? And they'd say what it was, and I was like, I've been teaching you that for years. And they're like, I don't know, it's just different. And I thought, oh, that's odd. And then it kept happening and it kept happening and it kept happening. And I was like, what is and so I my brain eventually figured out I call it the real bubble. This bubble has to be burst of, or maybe it's the fake bubble, but it has to be burst to where they go, oh, Jason's a real person. Sarah, his wife's a real person. The people on these coaching calls sharing all their wins and results are real people. And once that's burst and they meet some people in a little cohort and they meet Sarah and I, and they they we fist bump or we shake hands, we touch, right? They're like, they're real. There's something that shifts in their brain. And what I've noticed is then they absorb all the content differently, they get way different results. And so if we're gonna turn relationships into revenue, I think the the most significant thing that you could do is focus on depth, not width or broadness. It's depth. And people are like, how do you help people scale their companies so fast? And I'm like, I teach them to do the unscalable actions because that's what scales companies. So what's the the most depth? In person. After that, maybe a zoom call. Because you can still see body language, you can read them, you know, you can sense emotion. And after that, maybe a phone call. After that, maybe text. And so as we step down, the further you get away from depth, the the further away you get from impact, closing deals, results, everything. And so we are constantly asking how we can shift towards greater depth because that makes everything better. Everything increases. While most of the world are like, How can I spam a thousand people with AI today? Right.

Host1 10:59

So one of my favorite examples of this is um of doing the unscalable work is Chick-fil-A.

Host 11:07

Okay, yeah.

Host1 11:08

And their delivery service. So uh years back I had an office, and every day around the same time, I would not have time to like go get lunch. So I would order Chick-fil-A for lunch, and I would have them deliver it to the office. Now I would get like a eight or a twelve thing of like their grilled chicken nuggets and then like a little kale.

Host 11:29

This is really specific. People are gonna get hungry listening to this.

Host1 11:32

This is like a maybe at the time it was like a ten dollar, eight to ten dollar order. Well, this is not like a massive order.

Host 11:38

Yeah.

Host1 11:38

And what's interesting to me about Chick-fil-A is I think the statistic is that they process six to seven orders um over the course of a minute. Like their efficiency is just unbelievable. And so I'm sitting here racking my brain, like, why would they send somebody in a car that they had to buy to drive 10 minutes to my office, walk in, hand me the thing, so maybe that's three to five minutes, and then 10 minutes back when they could have just used that time to process another like 60 orders. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense to me. But I think that what you said is so true. The the companies that seem to have the most success are really good at doing the most unscalable things that there are. And I would love, love, love if you could unpack that just a little bit more because I think it is such a beautiful business strategy that people just overlook because they're they do exactly what you said. It's like, how could I spam a thousand people so that I can get my name out there and win more business? And you you guys have taken the opposite approach. Can you kind of unpack that philosophy?

Host 12:46

Yeah, yeah. So when we go wide, I'll give you an example. Like one of clients come to us all the time and they're like, hey, I'm trying to grow my business. What have you been trying? Direct mail. Cool. What do you what have you been doing? Oh, I'm sending out thousands of postcards every month. Is it working? Well, I did get one thing, or you know, it's never like, yeah, it's amazing. That's an example of not going deep, right? Like people get the card, like, I don't know if I need that. Um, and it's a long game. So I think like the Chick-fil-A story, I love it because you're like, why are they doing that? Because they're not maximizing for efficiency. What are they maximizing for? The problem is if we maximize for the wrong thing, Elon Musk is very big on this. He's like, don't opt if you when you optimize for the wrong things, you become very destructive in a business. There's an another great book, if you're really into operational stuff, called The Goal by Elihu Goldratt. And this bull, this book, spoiler, the goal is money in the business. Sorry, I ruined the whole book. But the the idea is that if you're optimizing every single piece, and it uses this hypothetical, or this not hypothetical, but this this story of this warehouse that's a factory that's producing stuff, and how they're optimizing every single stage to maximum efficiency. But the problem was each stage was siloed and maximized for efficiency, but it was actually creating more work. It was creating more inventory, it was creating more waste because the next step in the flow didn't need 5,000 widgets, they needed 10, you know, or whatever it was. And so now they have to store this. So now there's extra work to keep inventory. So when we it it actually helps you realize that if that department was lazier and worked less hard, but it it would help the entire goal because there would be less waste and it'd be more efficient because the entire flow always has to go at the pace of the slowest or lowest link in the chain. And it gives this example of this scout troop going on uh scouting, and the guy's like walking, and there's like the fat slow kid that can't keep up, and everybody he's at at the back of the pack, and everybody's having to like walk really fast, and then they stop and they wait till he finally gets there, and then they keep going, and that kid gets no break, and they just and they're like, This is super efficient because we're like we're doing this, and the and it's this isn't safe, we need to be stay together. So they figured out oh, put the slowest one at the front, put him at the front. Now he sets the pace. Now we're we don't have to stop. We all keep moving, everybody's comfortable, and that's the analogy for how the business should work. And so we got to make sure we're optimizing for the right thing. So Chick-fil-A might be optimizing for connection or they're optimizing for lifetime value. How do we keep clients loyal to us? Which is maybe how they made their chicken so addictive. I don't know. They put chemicals in it, I have no idea, but whatever. Don't sue me Chick-fil-A, everybody loves you. But people are like super addicted to Chick-fil-A, they love it. I hear people talk about it all the time. I'm like, okay, they they love it. They're like, and they start to have conversations. I've been at Masterminds where two people are talking about Chick-fil-A. I'm like, what? It's it's weird. They're like, oh no, I love this. Oh, yeah, it's so good. And they're I'm ordering it all the time. But it's because they've been optimizing for different things than just speed and efficiency and cranking dollars through. I'm sure they're making plenty of money. They aren't not optimizing for money, but it in the in the in the smaller pieces, they're optimizing for the long game rather than the short-term efficiency to get that cheeseburger or chicken burger or whatever out immediately, right? Which the previous system that was McDonald's and the speedy system from the McDonald's brothers. I think in and out still kind of follows that model. Super, super efficient. It was like revolutionary at the time. They were optimizing just for speed. Chick-fil-A, I'm sure, didn't throw all of that out. Like they there you have some efficiency going on there for sure. Um, but then they are optimizing for other things, right? Another great book on this is the book Giftology. And it talks about this idea that if you give people gifts, it can actually be more effective than marketing dollars. And that you because it's creating depth, it's creating connection. And these are not gifts. He says, Don't give gifts that are like door grow branded. Hey, I gave you this door grow shirt.

Host1 17:24

Well, you know, I have a very good friend in Canada that adopted that business model on his real estate team, and um, he prides himself on knowing the shoe size of every single member of his team. He's got like almost 60 people on his team. I think the number was 7% of their total budget goes back into gifts. And it's just like that's their business model is knowing their team members' shoe sizes, knowing their children, you know, their team members' children's and spouses' birthdays. Uh, like they just go really deep into relationship using that giftology framework. And it's it's it works so well. They they they skyrocketed to like a half a billion dollar real estate team in four years, five years doing this.

Host 18:05

Yeah, because it's about relationship. People do business with people, with and it's about relationships. One of the ways we've applied that that's very simple since we're a business mastermind, is if somebody has a problem or a challenge, I love books. I like have read a lot of books, I know a lot of books. So if somebody brings up a challenge, like if somebody's dealing with something like that related to this, I'd be like, let's ship them giftology, send it, send them the book. Let's send them the new model selling book from Jeremy Minor. Let's send them Profit First, uh, from Mike McAllow. It's about, you know, because they need some help with money, right? So we'll send them something, and you know, and I just I send it through Amazon, I put it in the gift bag, they do it for me, I put a note on it. Hey, I believe in you, and I send that out. One of the most powerful things, so this is gonna get a little serious here, okay. This last weekend, one of my mentors crashed in a plane and was killed. And his name was Aaron Stokes. He was an amazing man, and I've had a lot of coaches and a lot of mentors. He's one of the few that I've I I look at and I I want to be more like. And um he crashed his plane. It took the life of his son, his nephew, who both were 21. And Aaron was two years younger than me, he was 46. And um, and the life of a CEO that was a friend of his, and I th that that that and they were going skiing, they were going on a ski trip. Um, it's just super tragic. And one of the things that Aaron taught me that was such a game changer for my business, because a lot of times coaches we think it's tactics. I gotta give them the right skills, the right knowledge, and I create training material and I create all this stuff. And then we don't the clients don't get the results. They don't do it, they don't take action. And I remember he he he did everything on paper because he coached auto repair shops and he was like old school. He flipped over his flipboard, he writes on there, he writes, training plus hope equals results. And he just taught us about how if they're not getting results, if people aren't taking the action, getting the results that you need, if you're not getting the performance from a team member, from a client, or whatever, it's it's probably it might not even be the training. It might not be that the knowledge is uh is lacking. They just don't have enough belief in themselves, they don't have enough hope. And ever since he explained that and taught it, and then he illustrated it, it's almost never that I get off a coaching call with a client without saying, Hey, you can do this. I believe in you. And I'm getting emotional because this is something that Aaron instilled in me. And I have one of my big greatest memories that really had the biggest impact was my first high-ticket coach was uh a friend of mine here in Austin named Alex Sharfin, and uh coaches on operations. But I went to a mastermind, I was at this group thing that he had set up. I was his first high-ticket coaching client, and he brought in a bunch of people that are past clients for consulting. And I felt like the ant in the room. I was struggling in my business back then. I didn't know what I was like, I just I was in a bad marriage, my spouse didn't believe in me. I didn't even believe in myself. And I explained, and I'm I'm hearing all these business owners go around the room and they're sharing, like, oh, I've got this, you know, eight-figure business, and I've got this 10, like they're saying all these numbers, and I'm like, I don't have one, I'm not one. I'm not like, I'm not a million dollar, I'm not, I don't have a million revenue. And um, here I feel like the ant in the room, right? I'm like, I I'm not I'm not even supposed to be here. I feel so like insecure. And I'm they get to me and I'm like, well, I'm doing this and this is my business, and I'm gonna do this and this and whatever. And Alex. Interrupts me and he's like, Well, oh, yeah, that'll that'll never work. And I was like, No, I'm not, and he's like, if you're gonna start it, you should do this. And I'm like, He, I think he assumed maybe because my numbers were so bad that I was a startup, but I've been doing for years, right? And I was like, I was like, no, I am doing this right now. And then I explained what he was missing. I explained it, and then he looked at me, he paused, and he's got this gruff voice, and he like he's like, Jason, you have a $20 million company and you don't even know it. He validated me, and in that moment, I broke down, I had tears. I was crying in front of the entire room because it had been so hard. And I didn't even believe in myself then. Alex was the first, my first high-ticket coach, and I got lucky. He believed in me. He was like, You need to go get EMDR therapy because you have trauma from just getting running your business. You need to go get a personal trainer and start taking care of yourself. You're a million-dollar racehorse, you should treat yourself as such. Race horses get take better care of themselves than you, like all this stuff. And I was like, Yeah, okay. And I started doing this, and then I was like, why am I in this bad relationship with somebody who's cheated on me and treats me poorly and is an alcoholic? Like, I was like, I'm changing all this, right? And so, yeah, he believed in me and had that impact. And so when Aaron taught that principle, it was like the light bulb went off. I was like, Oh, yeah, this changed my whole life. I didn't even realize that how impactful that could be. I want to do that for all of my clients, and so I do that with every client. I tell them, hey, I believe in you, you can do this, and that makes a massive difference. That's depth.

Host1 23:42

Absolutely. Man, that is a beautiful and inspiring message. I really appreciate you taking the time to share that. And I really appreciate you um being vulnerable for a minute and and walking through some of the lessons you've learned and from your mentors and just the impact it's had on you. That's it's amazing, it's very inspiring. Yeah. You know, I go back to some of what are talking about in, you know, are you optimizing for the right thing? And um I think I have a little bit of a hunch, but I would love to hear what what is what do you really optimize for in relationships? And I I think I maybe heard depth, but if you could walk us through that, uh, I think it could really help a lot of people.

Host 24:24

That's a really good question. You know, if I think about it, I think what I yeah, I guess I've never really thought about, but when I'm creating relationships with people, my focus is how do I on how do I optimize for contribution? How do I benefit them the most? That's really, I think, it. It's contribution. I really believe Alec Sharfin taught me this. He says he he was really big on contribution. One of my key frameworks that I've developed, I call the four reasons for starting a business. And if you do these four things, you will have a lot more money, a lot more profit, a lot more revenue. But if you're misaligned with these, it would be very hard. A lot of people think we start a business to make money. Elijo Goldrat in The Goal says that's the goal, it's money. But I've coached hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, and I I know with pretty strong certainty that the beginning stage for most entrepreneurs is they make more and more money and they have less of these things as they do it. So the first reason for starting a business, primary, number one, is fulfillment in life. It's fulfillment. Number two, it's freedom, autonomy, choice, right? It's freedom. We want more and more fulfillment and freedom. But you can make a lot more money and have less fulfillment and freedom in your business. That's actually the default in the beginning for most entrepreneurs. Third, once we have fulfillment and freedom, it's contribution. We now want to benefit others because we're doing all right, right? We want to benefit our family, we want to benefit our clients, we want to benefit our team. And so, and that's why businesses exist. Businesses, if they're legitimate, exist for contribution. They should be making a real impact or a difference. Otherwise, they're stealing people's money, they're snake oil. It's that simple. Contribution. Once we are able to contribute, and control contribution is its own reward, nothing feels as good. You want fulfillment and a sense of freedom. Like contribution is just the icing on the cake. It feels so great. I'm getting chills just thinking about it. I love being able to benefit other people and to see that impact and to hear that their life is changing and transforming. And the um after contribution, it's support. You can't have those first three without the fourth, which is support. You have to have a good team. You cannot do there's no version of running a business, usually as an entrepreneur, in which you enjoy wearing every single hat in your own business. No personality type is schizophrenic enough to exist that they can wear every hat and be happy and they love it. And so we have to learn to rely on people and get the right support in order to get more fulfillment, freedom, and contribution. So it's that's why we start a business. That's where we build eventually build a business is otherwise, we'd just be freelancers. We just do one thing. Yeah, we'd be some sort of specialist. But we build a business because we want fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. Now, there is what I call the fifth reason. And this is what makes every entrepreneur different from everyone else on the planet. Is the fifth reason we want also. But the fifth reason is everyone else's highest priority, usually, and that's safety and security or safety and certainty. So most people on the planet want safety and certainty first. They it's more important than freedom. We saw this during the pandemic, a huge polar divide, right? And it was just they had everyone had different hierarchy of needs. But some people were like, forget your freedoms. I want to feel safe. Safety first. And others were like, that's crazy. Entrepreneurs in general were like, what kind of crazy planet am I living in with a whole bunch of aliens where I'm a minority, where freedom is not more important than feeling safe. And so there was the there was a divide. I remember walking around Costco without a mask on in Austin, and people were like, What are you doing? And then other people I saw without a mask, I was like, Are you a business owner? And they're like, Yeah, we're looking at each other, like, what? What's going on? This is crazy. Everyone's crazy. He's like the zombie apocalypse. People lost their minds. But that's the thing is the people that work for us, they want safety. So we have to recognize that. Usually our clients, that's why they come to us. Like a lot of my clients, clients, investors that want to work with property managers, they want safety and security, security. That's the product, right? And so we have to recognize that not everybody's like us if we're a business owner or we're an entrepreneur. We're different, we're the minority. And we strangely are willing to forego safety and certainty to some degree in order to have those other things. But I I have safety and security in my business. I do that through process documentation and systems and all this stuff. I've created a system. I'm not afraid to lose people. I can get them get replaced quickly, have a good hiring system. I've got the you know, the machine in place that gives me safety and security, but that wasn't my first goal. Long-winded answer, but there you go.

Host1 29:31

I love it. This has been such a good conversation. I want to respect your time. I always like to ask everybody, you know, you've given so much to us in the last 30-ish minutes. How can we get back to you? Uh, how can we, as listeners of the Partner and Profit Podcast, partner with you? What's important to you right now? How can we support you?

Host 29:48

You know, for those listening, it might be helpful or they might get some value by connecting with me or following me on social media. I'm actively working with, I'm always working with coaches, but one of my coaches right now is uh a YouTube coach, and I'm gonna be working on launching my personal brand. So feel free to connect with me on any social platform. Uh in my handle, everywhere is King Jason Hull, H-U-L-L. And if randomly you want to start a property management business or you're in the property management industry, check out doorgrow.com. And uh that's basically it.

Host1 30:19

Love it. We'll make sure that we link up the ways that people can connect with you in our show notes. And uh, if you listen to this, I highly encourage you to do so. Jason, I appreciate you so much for spending some time with me. This has been awesome.

Host 30:31

Yeah, it's been great. Thanks for pulling some information out of my head. I may not have even remembered. So awesome.

Host1 30:37

No, I love it. I appreciate it. Um, thank you all for continuing to listen to the Partner Profit podcast. This is another epic conversation. I'll see you on the next one. Peace.