Scott Brady is co-owner and principal of Progressive Association Management, a CACM-member HOA management company serving 228 communities and nearly 15,000 homeowners throughout Southern California. Since founding the association management division in 2020, Scott has grown the company into the fastest organically growing association management firm in California by limiting manager workloads, providing full back-office support, and holding every team member accountable to documented daily service standards. |
How do you fundamentally change the relationships you have with clients, community and your staff? How do you transform those relationships from transactional in nature to a mutually beneficial one? At our company, we believe that complete and total transparency about our business model, operations and decision making creates deep trust with these constituents, which at a fundamental level, transforms those relationships.
So what? Why go through these machinations to achieve this transformation? We believe, and can demonstrate, that once authentic trust is formed, it allows us to grow faster, at a lower cost, and improves our net profit.
Transparency, in essence, means being open, honest and clear in all communications, actions and processes. It involves sharing your successes and challenges openly, ensuring that clients fully understand the services you provide and the results they can expect. This level of openness is crucial in marketing, where trust and collaboration play vital roles in achieving successful outcomes. Business transparency creates client trust by removing uncertainty, proving honesty through open operations, and showing that a company has nothing to hide.
How Is Progressive Transparent?
- We share with our boards and residential owners our business model. We hire real estate agents to manage both our doors and our associations. We manage over 1,100 properties and do not have one salaried Property Manager on the payroll.
- The owner has one point of contact for residential management. We don’t have departments, third party companies or a “tech stack”: the owner works with one Property Manager on leasing, vendor coordination, inspections and any issues for that property.
- We share with our owners and boards that our managers work remotely from home. We handle operations and have the association management departments located in one central location, but all our managers, all 65 of them, work from the comfort of their home.
- For association management, on our website, there is a map of all the communities we manage, a copy of our contract, our Google reviews and even a page where they can calculate the base management fee we will charge them for our services.
- We limit the number of associations or doors a manager can manage: 100 residential properties, 10 associations or 1,000 owners, whichever comes first.
- We survey every residential property owner, association owner and board member annually for constructive feedback.
- Every owner, tenant and board member has my email address, all 17,000 of them, and they can contact the owner of the company if they are not satisfied with any aspect of their experience with our company.
- We offer 7 Performance Guarantees, and back up our marketing promises with real financial pain if we don’t perform as promised.
- For association management, we offer an “all-included” pricing option. Rather than receive a monthly statement with several line items for reimbursements (paper, postage, printing, envelopes, etc.) and other charges (software access, Echeck, budget assistance) they pay one lump fee per owner. For 11 months of the year, they only have 2 line items on their bill from us: base management and the all-included fee (we must bill for the annual disclosure package sent to all owners).
- We share our financials with our team members. We show them how we are reinvesting all “free cash flow” back into the company to continue our growth.
Trust Is Not a New Idea
We are not the first company to build our culture and marketing around trust. Would you agree that the following companies have earned your trust?
- Amazon: Trust low prices, quick delivery and easy returns.
- Costco: Trust low prices, high quality and new products.
- In-N-Out: Quality food, fast service and fair prices.
- Google: Fair rankings, artificial intelligence, quick searches and innovation.
- Apple: Easy interface, superior quality and constant innovation.
Trust is the foundation of human connection. It is mutual. One party offers it, and the other accepts it: the trustor and the trustee. It is communicated. It allows us to lower our defenses and stop doubting the motivations of others. Trust gives us a more positive view of the world. We see others as beneficial who improve our lives. Here are the “4 Pillars of Trust”:
- Humanity: Develop empathy and kindness with owners, tenants and employees.
- Capability: Create quality products, with superior experiences or services.
- Reliability: Deliver that product, experience or service consistently.
- Transparency: Openly share information, motives and actions.
The Benefits of Trustparency
Trust is the cornerstone of any successful business, and transparency is essential to earning and maintaining it. When companies communicate clearly and honestly, they create an environment of openness that fosters trust among customers, employees, and investors. This trust doesn’t just improve relationships, it enhances an organization’s overall reputation and credibility. It is transformative. For us, here are the benefits of that transformation:
Clients Stay and Pay Fairly
When clients trust you, they are willing to stay through change. We recently increased our base management fee, imposed a minimum fee, and implemented an annual owner renewal fee for our 900 residential property owners: one owner gave us notice. For association management, we mandated that all boards switch to our “all-included” pricing for our 15,000 owners and not one community gave us notice. Your clients will not begrudge necessary changes if you communicate openly why those changes are needed to maintain the level of service you offer.
Client Retention
Happy and content clients stay with you longer. Your customer acquisition costs decrease, and your value per owner increases. You suffer less churn and have a better relationship with your owners. For staff, we have had one staff member out of 26 quit in the past 2 years and have others in the industry seeking us out to work for us. It is far more expensive to secure new clients and find new employees than it is to retain the ones you already have.
Honest Feedback (Reciprocity)
We survey every tenant, owner, board, shareholder and employee with whom we work. We make it clear that bonuses, promotions and pay depend on the results of these surveys. Because we communicate that clearly, we receive honest and consistent feedback from these parties. This is so important to our company that we promoted a team member to “Communications Director” whose job it is to document and prove that we provide the superior service we promised in our marketing.
Referrals and Positive Reviews
We currently have 478 five-star Google reviews for residential management and in the notoriously difficult space of association management, we have over 310 five-star reviews. Good reviews improve your Google “juice” and are usually the first place prospective clients go to decide on your company.
Grace and Forgiveness
We make mistakes. Managers don’t respond to calls quickly, hire a mediocre vendor, place a difficult tenant in a property, or errant charges are made to accounts. With a higher level of trust, your clients forgive you and provide some business “grace.”
Implement New Programs with Less Resistance
We, like many of you, will hear of and then decide to implement a new program. It may be for income reasons, but usually we feel it is in the best interest of our boards and owners. Without trust, they assume you are doing it for self-gain. With trust, and an explanation and rationale for that new program, there is less owner resistance.
Become a Missionary, Not a Carpetbagger
Many in our industry, particularly those owned by private equity firms, see our industry as immune from higher interest rates and benefiting from artificial intelligence, and are paying immense sums to buy into it. I meet with them all the time. They care about the potential profit and seeming certitude of property management. I am less convinced they care about forming trust with our clients and transforming that relationship. I do. I want to improve this industry by elevating the experience of our owners, tenants, boards and team members, by promising, providing and having proof of superior service, and by being totally transparent with our business model so owners, boards and team members completely trust us, which transforms not just our relationships with them, it transforms the industry.
I encourage you to embrace “trustparency” in your business and reap the numerous benefits.
