Want to stay competitive, but having difficulty finding the right numbers? Daniel Craig, Founder, and CEO at ProfitCoach is back on the podcast. He talks with Brad of how their benchmark study helped shape the NARPM Accounting Standards and how the data helps you choose competitive figures. Also, what you can do to get a chance for a free consultation regarding your numbers.
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Connect with Daniel Craig on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-craig-99751234
Learn more about Brad Larsen and RentWerx at www.rentwerx.com!
Brad Larsen: Everyone in today's episode will be speaking with Daniel Craig from Profit Coach. Listen in on the benchmark study and your opportunity for a free one on one consultation with his team on your numbers, listen in.
Announcer: Welcome to the Property Management Mastermind Show with your host, Brad Larson. Brad owns one of the fastest growing property management companies in San Antonio, Texas. This podcast is for property managers. By property managers, you'll hear from industry leading professionals on best practices, new ideas, success stories and lessons learned. This is your opportunity to learn about the latest industry buzz surrounding property management as well as tips and strategies to improve your business. Need a repair at 2 a.m. easy does it easy repair coordinates, maintenance and nothing else and takes after our maintenance calls for property managers working with your property management software so you can see exactly what easy is doing without leaving your own software. From Las Vegas, Nevada, our full time maintenance coordinators will dispatch your work orders directly with your vendors. Give us a call at 800 4886032 or visit our website Easy Repair Hotline LLC.
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Brad Larsen: Welcome everybody to another edition of the Property Management Mastermind Podcast Show. I'm your host, Brad Larson. And today's guest, I'm bringing on Mr. Daniel Craig. And we're going to be talking all kinds of fun stuff about profit management, the the accounting standards and the benchmark study, because this is really important stuff for what we want to do as an industry to be able to gather that information in, digest it, and apply it to what we want to understand in our industry. So it's really important that we listen to what Daniel Craig's got to say, and we have to participate in some of the things he's going to offer. So without further ado, I want to bring on Daniel DC, my man, my Ping-Pong nemesis, because he's beaten me handily in ping pong and it just drives me insane. But next time, the next time, my friend, I will get you somehow.
Daniel Craig: I've got to bring you. You better bring your $500 ping pong paddle. Well, what.
Brad Larsen: I'm going to have to do is break one of your arms or something. That's easy math, right?
Daniel Craig: You're probably right.
Brad Larsen: Yeah. So stick a baseball bat to the ankle, and I'm going to be a winner on that one. All kidding aside, so we've had you on before, and you've got to give us a few minutes to tell us what you are, what you do, who you are, and all the good stuff. Because then we can we can go from there and just conversation. Go ahead.
Daniel Craig: Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. Thanks for having me on. So I'm the CEO of Profit Coach and we came into this industry, specifically the property management industry in 2017, ran an accounting company before then. And we've always had this mission of helping entrepreneurs optimize what they get out of their business by understanding their numbers, knowing where they are, knowing where they want to go, and knowing how to close the gap in terms of maximizing their financial performance. And so we were looking for an industry where we could specialize in 2017 and through series of events got guiding us. We landed on property management and right out of the gate, one of our partners said, You know what? We need to really understand the financial performance of this industry by doing a financial benchmark study. So in 2017, we started the efforts to do a national benchmarking study on our own dime in the property management space, recruited about 50 companies to give us their data, and we released an initial version of that benchmarking study at a conference in January of 2018. And Brad, I'll never forget I get off the stage after having done this gut wrenching exercise of trying to do a benchmarking study with 50 different companies on 50 different chart of accounts and hoping that I got something of value out of the data. And I'll never forget the very first words out of your mouth after that presentation. You're like, Daniel, you're a blankety blank genius, but your data was pretty much garbage. You know that breath?
Brad Larsen: I do. I gave you guys a little bit of a frank follow up. Let's say the upfront down, a dirty, honest four letter word follow up, because the reason behind that is you guys did mammoth work. I thought it was fantastic, the effort you put into it, but it didn't really give us anything to measure. And so this is where we started to conceive this concept of a corporate accounting standards. And so we went to NAWAPA and we proposed it. They sliced off a budget, and next thing you know, we engaged with your company and you guys created it. And so it put it into motion. We adopted it right away. And the industry has been slowly adopting it more and more and more because it's a fantastic guideline, a very good chart of accounts, a very good chart of account system and an operational flow with all the definitions. That was one of the things that I was most upset about is no definitions were ever put in place. So, for example, you know, what is a vacancy? Oh my God, you could spin this round and round. Like, what is a vacancy? We could go ten different directions. When is a vacancy start? You know, define it. Is it when they're not paying rent? Is it when no one's living there and you see where I'm going? We could spin it ten different ways. That's what the accounting standards attempted to do, was to put those into a definition where everybody would be speaking the same language. It really is a language of numbers.
Daniel Craig: Yeah, and it's a language of comparison as well, I think in the past and this is I think one of the things you were passionate about, Brad, was we go to these conferences, we have conversations and it's sort of the wild west of everybody gets to define what they mean by what they say. So someone is calculating revenue per unit and they're including all their maintenance and brokerage income and someone else isn't. And the one guy feels like he's underperforming, but nobody really knows what we're talking about. And so it's I think the the language of the accounting standards is a language of comparison to facilitate real, meaningful conversations and break people's boxes. Around what they think is possible. And that's what I think is one of the most powerful things about the new accounting standards. And in particular, the benchmarks that are part of the accounting standards is when you have clear definitions and someone comes to you and says, Hey, would you be interested in knowing what 100 other companies are doing out there and they've got twice as much revenue per unit as you do and you can trust the data. Then you start to reconceive your notions of what's possible. You do new things in your business. Change happens, and the entire bar of financial performance in this industry starts to go up. And that to me is what's really exciting about this.
Brad Larsen: Well, for example, let's let's dive into this just for a second, revenue per unit, right? So this is why we did this. This is where I'm going is because you mentioned it earlier, but I want to clarify it because define revenue. Write revenue equals your management fees. Your your leasing fees. Keep going from there. What you would exclude is the money you get in from the commercial building that you rent. You exclude the carwash business. That is it's it's tied to your management company. Yeah. That's what is beautiful about this. So define just revenue per unit. Go.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that you have to start out with is how do we define these metrics? And the way that we define them is based off of a standard chart of accounts. And so this is really kind of the heart and soul of when people talk about getting on the accounting standards. What they're talking about largely is getting on a standard chart accounts, which breaks down and helps you divide out the various divisions of your business. That's really key, because what we've seen over and over again in this industry is people are doing property management, they're doing maintenance, they're doing brokerage. And inevitably, usually what you find is that one division is propping up another. So the chart of accounts breaks the revenue out into three key buckets property management revenue, maintenance revenue, brokerage revenue. And then inside of property management revenue, we have what we call residential PM income that doesn't include commercial buildings, that doesn't include short term, that is revenue derived from residential property management, long term single family property management. And so that's revenue. And then we define what we mean by unit. So revenue per unit, well, we look at units as occupied units. Most companies collect most of their income. When a unit is occupied, some people collect income. It's not occupied, but we have to have a way to compare. So we pick one which is the most common one, which is people derive revenue when the units occupied. So what that means is revenue, which is residential, long term, single family property management. It can include multifamily too, but we're mostly focused on single family divided by occupied units. Brad There's my definition.
Brad Larsen: I love it, and that's what we want to accomplish because how can we compare revenue per unit from company A to company B when the definitions vary? And this is the beautiful thing and I wanted to break it down to like a really grassroots level, just as an example, because people look at it like, what do I care about, you know, comparing myself to the left and right. Well, it's very important because what if you want to buy, what if you want to sell and you're going to need those numbers to present to a lender and or to present to an acquirer wanting to purchase you. And it needs you need to have clarity. And I think this is a fantastic thing. So part of the benchmarking study that I want to talk about with you next is you're taking the data from other companies, you're compiling it, you're making sure they're on the chart of accounts. You're making sure that we're all speaking the same language, and now we're comparing all these different companies to actually come up with an industry normal and potentially actually where there could be some decision points being made. And so I want to I want you to talk more about that.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. Okay. So let's let's use the example that we just had when we did this benchmarking study and released our accounting standards in 2019, we were working off of a data set from 50 different companies, each of whom were on a separate chart of accounts and booking things in different ways. And so that while we tried to break things out and clean up the data and we spent a ton of time, I think we spent about 1500 hours on the study, so we spent a bunch of time cleaning up the data. The reality is, is when everybody was on a separate chart of accounts, there's only so much granularity that you can dive into. And so now that we've released the chart of accounts and we're fast forwarded three years from that, we now have a whole cohort of companies that have adopted that chart of accounts, have been using it for a number of years and have a lot more granularity, consistent granularity baked into their books and a level of granularity that's consistent with a large number of companies. So now we can go in and start looking at things like not just revenue per unit, but management fees per unit, leasing fees per unit, pet fees per unit. Brad He's starting to get excited. Maintenance coordination. Fees per unit and we can start understanding pricing, for example, at a whole lot more of a granular level.
Daniel Craig: Use another example. We can start looking at labor allocation on a lot more of a granular level. And the first study we kind of divided between management and labor and direct labor. Now we're going to be able to start looking at things like leasing labor, sales, labor and more granularity on labor spend. What about other costs? How much do people spend on rent as a percentage of revenue on average, on technology, on software, on employee benefits, a variety of much more granular insights that we're going to be able to use to benchmark and really dial in financial performance at a much more granular level for property management companies. And I think the thing that's also exciting is we're going to have a broader data set that we can segment and slice and dice in greater ways. So, hey, you want to know how you stack up to companies that are in the 2 to 3 or 2 to 400 unit range? But we can give you that number. What about the 4 to 600 range boom? We can give you that number six, 6 to 1000. So there's going to be more opportunity to segment based off of similar sizes or even locations of business as well. So granularity is going to be a lot better in the study. There's going to be a whole new set of metrics.
Daniel Craig: We're going to dive into maintenance performance because we weren't really able to do that before in the past. So what does profitability look like in maintenance? What is labor efficiency look like in maintenance? So new metrics, new granularity, new segmentations, and we really need people to pony up and contribute their data to this collective project of raising the bar of financial performance in this industry. So that's that's the mission we're on right now is to recruit a whole cohort of companies. Right now, we're at about 100 companies signed up to participate, and we're going to cap it at around 200. So this is a great opportunity because not only are you going to help contribute to what's going on in the community in terms of this endeavor. But as part of contributing your data, we're going to give you a front row seat on not on the insights that come out of the data as those are generated. But then also at the end of the study, we're going to sit down with every participant that wants us to and actually show them their financial performance stacked up to the new benchmarks. So participants are going to get a ton of value out of participating in the study, not only by helping develop the benchmarks, but then getting a front row seat on how their numbers stack up to those benchmarks.
Brad Larsen: Let's talk through some of this, because there's going to be, as I mentioned earlier, some decision points. And when I'm talking about this, this is what the data is going to give them opportunity to understand. So, for example, if you are a management company with 300 units and you're looking at the management companies that are between between 507 hundred units, but your profitability and your range of your realm might be better than the profitability between 507 hundred units. You might look at that and say, well, I'm fine with where I am. I don't want to grow to be a bigger company because the profitability kind of dips a little bit as you grow. It's like a staircase almost. It kind of goes up and flattens out or goes up and flattens out as you grow. So that's going to give somebody an actual like, okay, well, I get it. That gives me some actual information to make a decision. Do I want to stay where I am or do I want to try and grow bigger? Another one that's really exciting is it gives people the opportunity to understand where they are in their revenue and their feed generation.
Daniel Craig: Exactly.
Brad Larsen: Give us one there because for example, pet fees and you can look at similar companies that are generating I'm going to try to use round figures, let's say that generating 10,000 a year in pet fees and they're a 500 unit company, but the industry standard is they're generating 40,000 A fees for a 500 unit company that's going to tell a management company, hey, knock, knock, I probably need to be charging more in pet fees because everybody else around me is doing that. And if the market meeting, everybody else says you should be charging more for a pet fee, that's the decision. Do you can say, all right, instead of charging $5 a pet fee, you can charge $25 a pet fee. I'm just using crazy numbers made up, but that's going to influence them in a decision. So this is real world. You can apply to your business to help keep you in line with the rest of the industry. That's the whole point of this, am I right?
Daniel Craig: That's 100% of the point. Again, I think one of the biggest values of this whole project is for property managers to understand what's possible. And I think after the first study, a lot of people realized that things were possible, that they didn't realize before. Yes, you can achieve a 3.5 to 4 labor efficiency. You know, people say, well. Our staff are just work so hard and blah, blah, blah and, you know, find out, well, they're still on paper checklists and so they haven't made the investment into workflow management software. And so it's interesting how these numbers based conversations, again, break people's boxes around what's possible, cause them to look outside of themselves for what other people are doing. And really, it's this number thing is a large part of what helps just general operational improvement because people see, here's what my competitor is doing or what my friend is doing, here's what I'm doing. I've got to go actually pay attention to what they're doing. I thought I was the best. And I'll tell you, Brad, one of the people that participated in the first benchmarking study, it was right around the time that we were rolling this out and he made a comment to me, he's like, Yeah, you know what? I know that I'm going to be at the top of the pack of all the benchmarks. And and lo and behold, he wasn't. And that's the.
Brad Larsen: To me was it? This wasn't.
Daniel Craig: Me. You know, he's a great he's he's he's a great guy and he's doing a lot of great things. But he thought he was sort of the cat's meow in the industry and he just wasn't. I mean, he was doing some good things. And so, again, he got a new sense of what's possible and what it potential was. So the point of all of this is a lot of this has to do with what's possible, what's what's what your potential is. So taking this back to revenue per unit, where we start with that conversation and this is one of the things that we're going to dig into more that we didn't even dig into in the first study, which is let's segment revenue per unit relative to average rent. So a lot of people think about revenue per unit as sort of like, well, I'm at 300, that's great. But what determines how much you can charge? We think the best proxy of what determines how much you can charge is actually your average rent. Now be careful. Some people say I can't charge what he can because my average rent is lower. Well, what we are what we found and into in a small data set and we're going to dive into much deeper in this study is how do you management fees scale down as average rent goes up.
Daniel Craig: So we know there's that relationship. So we're going to dive into that. And then what's the structure and relationship of other fees like leasing fees or pet fees related to average rent? So there are some things that are rent dependent like management fees. Generally speaking, in higher end areas, management fees are lower. In low rent areas, management fees are higher. So we're going to look at some of those nuances and ultimately help people really get clear on here's the range that the people with a similar average rent, here's where the top performers are in your average rent bracket. They're charging somewhere between 15 to 17 or 17 to 20% of average rent and total revenue per unit. And then from there, we can go to the level of what you are talking about, which is, hey, what are the key ingredients of how people are getting up their pet fees, resident benefits packages, lease renewal fees, tenant renewal fees, etc., etc., etc.. So those are the kinds of things that we're going to be able to see and help people get a new sense of what their potential is through the study.
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Brad Larsen: There are a couple of things I want to add. We engage your team to do an annual search on rent works. So the people that do that, they pay you a little bit of a fee. You can work it out with whatever. But we get a lot of consulting. We get a really deep dive into our numbers and then we get two or three file calls from another one. I forget. But what you do which is which is what I love, I'm trying to make a point is you take that data from the benchmark study and then you apply it deeply to rent works on an annual basis. Because Brad, you generated X number of revenue in this one little code of line. Again, call it a pet fee and you generated this X per line one code. Well, the industry standard is actually lower than that. So you're doing that right. Industry standards lesson that you really probably should consider to bump up your application fee if you're only charging X for application fee. We're seeing the industry standard is is double X and you're charging X. So this is this is where this is where it can really flush out and actually pay for itself. Now, have you said that?
Daniel Craig: And by the way, Brad, before you move on, that consultation that you were just talking about that we do for you is going to be very similar to what we're going to do for all of the participants in this study. So you don't have to pay to contribute. We value your contribution. And frankly, it's not even going to take that much of your time because our our team can do the data extraction. But because we appreciate you participating, the the one on one deep dive review that Brad was just describing is very similar to what we're going to do for all the participants.
Brad Larsen: Well, you beat me to my question, because what I was going to ask you is how does how do the participants benefit? Is it going to be a webinar format at the end where you kind of talk to everybody who participated? It'll be one on one.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. What we're going to offer for those who want is one on one.
Brad Larsen: That's fantastic. That's the reason enough just to throw in your data and how how intrusive is it? And talk to me through talking through what they got to do to participate in that study.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. Yeah. So here's here's what we need. One of the things that is unique about this study compared to really anything that anything else that's done in this industry or really anything that's been done in the past, not to sound too self-aggrandizing, is that this is not key phrase self reported data. Okay? This is not self-reported data. This is not you going on to a Google form and filling out a bunch of numbers that you may or may not totally know. This is data extracted from the source of record. And so what that looks like is we're pulling out two years worth of financial data, property data from and transaction data from your corporate accounting software such as QuickBooks. And then two years worth, 2 to 3 years worth, depending on how much you have available, because we're trying to do some year over year analysis as well, which we didn't do in the first study. But in terms of the data for your property management software, about 2 to 3 years worth of unit data, we're going to be looking at some things like average rent as well. But primarily we're interested in how many units did you add, how many units did you lose, how many were occupied? Because that's the data that when we layer with the financial data from your QuickBooks, we get those metrics that are unit based economics.
Daniel Craig: So it's not just revenue, but it's revenue per unit, for example. So that's the data that we need. And it's actually pretty sophisticated the way that we analyze, analyze that data. Like, for example, in terms of reviewing the level of data integrity in this study is super high. So we're not just looking at it, but we're reviewing at a high level the underlying transactions in your pal so that we can make sure that the data is clean. The point I'm making is that there are a number of reports that we need from both softwares. In order to do this, it's possible for you to pull those and send those to us. But the easiest way is just giving us temporary access to the source of record. And this is the standard way that we handle this. We go in and grab the reports, get out and you can remove our access. So really in terms of what's required of the participant, you have to fill out an initial application, tell us who you are, give us access to your corporate accounting data so that we can review that and make sure it's data that we can actually use. And then from there, give us access to your property management software.
Daniel Craig: Tell us a little bit more about your business and some just general questions about your labor structure and whatnot. And then we do the rest of extracting the data from your corporate accounting software, from your property management software. And then we sanitize that in terms of anything that needs to be reallocated, make sure it's all up to snuff, merge it with the larger data set. And then that's when we go to work slicing and dicing the data and releasing the aggregate study findings to the general public. So we're not releasing any private data. All the data's kept 100% confidential. Our releasing is general findings based on the aggregate data set. But again, in terms of what's required of you, fill out an application, give us access, we pull the reports, we do the dirty work, we clean it all up, we merge it all together. We define the insights. And then at the end of the process, if you want, we sit down with you and give you that one on one view of how you stack up the latest industry trends and help you get an understanding of what your top opportunities are to add ten, 15, 30, 100,000 to your bottom line next year.
Brad Larsen: Key question is, are you going to release your haircare secrets? That's what I want you. No secrets.
Daniel Craig: Come on. It's just like whatever, whatever gel my wife can find on discount. So I know it's all right.
Brad Larsen: So serious. Punch you in the face. Time, soapbox time. I want you to be careful on how you discuss churn with your clients because it's very sensitive. One of the things that I had a little bit of an irritation point, you know, I chewed you out one time before earlier about churn is you're not you're not in our shoes. And so you don't know necessarily how churn works in a management company because you may not have those conversations with an owner who says he only wants to rent to margins. You may not have that conversation with an owner who says he doesn't have any money for repairs. Just have him get a ceiling fan or a box fan and put in their home in Arizona, a 110 degree heat. So churn is something that is tough to to actually quantify and address a different brand.
Daniel Craig: Since you said you're going to punch me in the face, let me just jump in. It's not hard to quantify it. Maybe it's hard to diagnose and categorize, but. Yes, okay.
Brad Larsen: So it's it's there I mean, it's a black and white.
Daniel Craig: Number, you know.
Brad Larsen: Units in, units out. But for any of any advisor outside of the management company that's actually doing it to say, well, your churn sucked this year because you suck.
Daniel Craig: Sure.
Brad Larsen: That is offensive. You know, we take that person.
Daniel Craig: Does that sound? Is that what I told you?
Brad Larsen: No, you didn't. No. See, we're having a good time with it. But you understand, we killed the sales when we when you and I talked six months ago or a year ago or whatever, about six months ago. Brad, your churn was like, what? We're at 28% or something static. Well, it's the hot sales market and it's almost like we have to get defensive. And it's not you. It's just. It's just the data. You just said it like like a matter of fact, blanket, like black and white. Well, your churn was 28%. And me being an emotional wreck, like, oh, we had a bunch of sales and it was it wasn't my fault, you know? Right. And so it's just a fun little tidbit to tease each other on.
Daniel Craig: Sure, sure, sure. Now, what we really need, I think I actually got this concept from you is the ability to segment churn into good, neutral and bad churn. That's right. You did. And unfortunately, none of the property management softwares make this straightforward. And so that being said, that's what we really need to do. I don't think that's really going to be something that we can totally do in this study. However, here's what we can do. We can still compare churn across the country or in similar markets in a certain time period and ask the question, why did some some companies experience 35% churn where as other companies experience only 15 or 20% churn and in the same market, for example.
Brad Larsen: So those are that's good data. That's good.
Daniel Craig: That's those are the kind of comparison points that we can use to have a more meaningful conversation. Because here's the thing. I've never met a property manager that ever had any customer service issues. All the churn experience is a result of the market. It's all the hot sales market. Yeah, I think facetious. But at some point we've just got to look in the mirror and say, okay, now I actually might be responsible for some of this churn. And one of the ways we can sort of get into that is by saying, well, what are other companies experiencing in a similar market?
Brad Larsen: And some of the things we do to combat that is we try to do outgoing surveys. We segment that into good, neutral, bad losses, like a bad loss as they fire us because we screwed up a neutral loss as they like, they move back into a home. Sure, a good loss is like we sell their home, right? So some of those good losses are good because you potentially capture the sale. But obviously the bad loss is if you're racking up five, 10% for bad losses because they fire you. There's there's some issues that you've got to address.
Daniel Craig: Yeah.
Brad Larsen: What I want to talk about next is your next project after the benchmarking study are kind of during the benchmarking study, there's we're working on the national accounting standard certification, the A.C. So kind of give me the background of that and let's kick that around a bit.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. So again, Brad, I think this was something that you brought to the table. And the idea here is that for those companies who have adopted the new accounting standards, they're operating in general at a higher level of financial performance and financial and. Integrity in many cases, then companies who have not adopted those standards. And again, what are the normal accounting standards? It's a standard chart of accounts. It's a standard set of metrics and benchmarks, and it's also a standard set of financial controls, best practices in terms of how you handle both your trust funds and your corporate funds. And so the point here is that there's a lot of value in adopting these. And for companies that do adopt them and do comply with the standards outlined in our accounting standards, they're operating most likely a higher level of financial integrity than other property management companies. And that needs to be observed and valued and designated so that that value can then be sold or at least represented to their clients. And so that's what the accounting standard certification is all about. It's about the ability for property management entrepreneurs to demonstrate to prospects, clients and the wider industry an enhanced level of knowledge, skill and professionalism within their business, around their financial practices. And so that's going to involve a certification course, a certification exam, certain verifications that have to be defined about their business, and then a certification, a designation that can then be represented again to prospects and clients on their website and their marketing and their branding about the level of financial integrity that they have in their business as a result of this designation.
Brad Larsen: Yeah, this is one of those things that we proposed in the beginning when we first initiated the corporate accounting standards was at some point, let's work up a designation, let's work up a certification. And it kind of falls in the same lines of the CRC, which is the the certified residential management company certification through NATA, which is a fantastic certification if you can get it, even if you don't even have a designation at all, you can get the CRC booklet and that's your playbook for running a good management company. It really is a well read document, so I think that's kind of what we were trying to model it after. In addition to the fact of rewarding the companies that went on to the corporate accounting standards, rewarding them for going through the certification process and giving them a big red sticker that's going to go on their website. Right? Giving them a marketing leg up from their competition to say, no, we are NASDAQ certified from accounting standards certified. And so it's a really good marketing piece for them to help build their business in the same line, helping them run their business very well, more efficient because they're using those accounting practices that need to be implemented because we are money managers. That's what we do. We're money.
Daniel Craig: Managers. Yeah. You know, kind of to this point, Brad, I was just talking with someone who does acquisition evaluations for probably one of the most significant acquirers in our industry right now. So she's the one that's looking at the books and the trust accounts and the financials of companies that her company is looking to acquire. And I was just on the phone with her yesterday and she's like, Daniel, you would not believe like there are so many people that still need to get on this financial bandwagon in terms of the accounting standards and proper handling of other people's money. It is the Wild West. It's terrible. She's like and she's like, You know what? It's crazy. There are big names in this industry who are just out to lunch on this issue. And so she didn't tell me how this big names are. If she did, I wouldn't divulge them on this podcast. But the point is, there's a lot of opportunity to up our game. We are managing millions of dollars of other people's money and we need to follow certain best practices. Those best practices are outlined in in our accounting standards. And if you are following those which you should be, then you should be getting some kudos for that so that you can demonstrate the integrity of your company versus the property management company down the line. And I think that's what this project is about.
Brad Larsen: That's exactly what it is. And so give us an update on working with the NA Designation Committee to kind of where you are with the timeline to potentially see this SC be implemented.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. You know, we're very early stage, you know, frankly in our firm just signed off on this proposal. I think it was the beginning of this month. So we're very early stage. But the designation committee has looked at what's been proposed and they're very excited about the elements and ingredients of this. And so it has the full support of our board and our finance committee and then our designation committee. And as we get towards the latter end of the year, we're going to be working on the release of this. The 2022 financial benchmark study is set to release at ARPA National in October, and we expect the accounting standards certification to release somewhere in the fall of 2022 as well.
Brad Larsen: That's fantastic. So how do people learn more about the benchmarking study sign up? Because remember, it's capped at 200. And inside of that, you get a free consultation, a free deep dive with your team. So I think that's in itself worth it and it cost of nothing. So where do they go to get that information, get signed up?
Daniel Craig: Yeah, if you don't mind, I'm actually going to share my screen and basically.
Brad Larsen: It's great on a podcast, buddy. Let's share your haircare secrets, too.
Daniel Craig: Okay, so here's the landing page. Go to benchmarks, PM profit coach dotcom and you're going to get all sorts of information that you need about this study. So again, two steps to dive in, contribute your data and receive a one on one financial performance view with us. And so this is presented again by Anupam and profit coach very simply how it works got to apply to join apply here by July 10th. That's what you need to do. Once you're up applied, we'll review your data and make sure we can accept you into the study and you then contribute your data. And then at the end of the whole process, again, compare your results with a one on one analysis with us. There are just stories, stories upon stories of people who have benefited from engaging this process. So just got this one last week or the week before. Converting to the narrative chart of accounts has made a huge difference in our year to year reports. Not only are we understanding our financial performance with greater clarity, we now have a much clearer line of sight of where we can improve to maximize profitability. That increased clarity is producing great results for us. Well.
Brad Larsen: Nice job, Chris Lindquist. Yeah, well said in that review because that that paraphrases it perfectly.
Daniel Craig: Yeah. So here, here just in a nutshell, why does this matter? We need benchmarks. This industry needs benchmarks to help raise the bar. It just I can't say any more simpler than that. You have to know what the top performers are doing and that knowledge has to be spread abroad so that other people can achieve that same level of performance. So, number one, we need benchmarks. Number two, we need the latest benchmarks. The 2019 benchmarks are good. It's now time for an accounting standard, 2022. So that's why we're releasing this study. And this is really the time for property management, property managers and ARPA members to contribute back to the community in a way that's going to drive huge benefits for them as well. And so what this means to you is you'll receive admittance to the exclusive 2022 study contributors Club Private Facebook Group with insider updates. We're also looking at some special events for contributors as well. And like we've talked about, you'll receive that one on one financial performance review from us where we do a deep dive analysis of your financial performance compared to updated key financial benchmarks. I give you the top highlights of your financial performance strengths in your top opportunities for improving profitability. And folks, we've got tons of companies already joining in and we hope you'll be the next person to click this. Join the study button and contribute your data.
Brad Larsen: Yeah. Copy at 200. Makes it for a nice even round good database to dig from. Really appreciate you coming on DC. This has been a fantastic conversation. Looking forward to the NSC and what you have to offer with the committee. I know it's in the early stages and there was talks about classes, there are talks about recurring like every year. There's some interesting stuff behind it, but I do feel that's one of the best things that can be done is it doesn't have to be the business owner either. It can be the key accounting person that can that can earn that designation on behalf of the business. And so it's just going to be a cool thing to see and then a lot of marketing effort behind it. So going to benchmark, say the URL one more time from.
Daniel Craig: Benchmark dot pm profit coach dot com.
Brad Larsen: Perfect appreciate your time here again, buddy and look forward to beating you and ping pong sometime soon. Just like your haircare secrets. You know, I've got to get that hair gel formula down and we'll stay in touch. We'll see you at the next go around. All right.
Daniel Craig: Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me on.
Brad Larsen: Thanks, DC.
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