From road warrior to property manager: How Bobby Russo started in property management

They say timing is everything, so timing delivered me to property management.

Being a 25-year veteran road warrior, I was looking to slow down and be the father my wife told me I could be. I wanted to be part of a company that capitalized on a high-touch service model, yet I didn’t want to manufacture a product and get back on the road to peddle it.

My father owned a real estate company that had some properties under management. He suggested that I join him and grow that side of the business. The timing was perfect—it involved no travel, a focus on service, and time to spend at home with the kids.

After telling my friends that I was going to be a property manager, they looked at me like I was crazy. They told me that they’d heard property management caused nothing but headaches. I began to think to myself: How can such a large and lucrative industry be so bad?

The first conclusion that I came to was that some of these property managers must be doing it wrong; it just can’t be that bad. That’s why the first thing that I did was to go out and learn how not to be a property manager, and then put the pieces together to be a great property manager.

My inspiration was Thomas Edison, who tells us that he didn’t fail a thousand times at inventing the light bulb, but that he found a thousand ways not to build one. Well, I found a lot of ways not to be a property manager, mostly in the way that you treat tenants and plan for the future. Being in sales, I learned a long time ago that a sales goal without a sales plan is a sales wish.

On day one, I established our core value proposition with four key elements: tenants, vendors, owners, and community.

On day two, I started working on a sales plan that would drive our core value proposition to success and make us the premier property management comcpany in Arizona.

In short, we would become property managers by design, not by default. Our sales and operating plan is a deliberate process with a predictable outcome.