We invite YOU to build your future in Property Management with the Future of Property Management.
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jon Berghoff, founder & CEO of The XCHANGE Approach, as they talk about this can’t-miss LIVE event.
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Hosted by Andrew Smallwood and Laura Mac
Featuring Jon Berghoff
Produced by Andrew Smallwood, Laura Mac, and Carol Housel
Edited by Isaac Balachandran
Transcript
Andrew Smallwood
Hello. Professional property manager,s Andrew Smallwood here, and I am joined today by my, my good friend and a mentor of mine, John Burghoff. You can see by the hat he's got exchange on the hat. John is one of the many leaders on the exchange team and we wanted to bring John on today to talk a little bit about what's coming up. August 23rd and 24th, we've got Triple Win Leadership Exchange. The artist was formerly known as PMLX, a property management leadership exchange. And when we're seeing.
Jon Berghoff
A name change, also earns a sound effect, Andrew.
Andrew Smallwood
That's right. And there's a lot that's going to be the same if you've attended PMLX in the past, but there are also some cool new things that are going to be happening as well. We're excited to share more and more information about this with you over the days and weeks to come. We brought on John specifically to talk about a couple of things, and John, we've been working with you and your team for the last couple of months and making some plans for August. And there are some people who are they have different levels of familiarity with the exchange approach, right, in the way that this event will be designed and facilitated. But it's worth talking about specifically, I think because it is so different and distinct from the way that a lot of online and even in-person events, you know, our thought about design and facilitate it. So I was wondering if you could share with us a little bit about what could somebody expect and what would they see that's different about the way this is going to be designed and facilitated?
Jon Berghoff
Yeah. Thanks, Andrew and appreciate the chance to talk about it. We're super looking forward to the TWL event hosting it with you all this August. And I think the first thing that comes up for me, I think about you all at second nature. And one of the things that our team loves that we've learned and been inspired by working with you is how much you have doubled down on the experience that you love to create for your customers, and even taught them about the experience they create for their customers. In one word, what we do differently than everyone else online has to do with the experience. And I can say a couple of things about what we do differently and what folks can expect at this event in August. But I think it's also a good idea to also acknowledge I'll speak for myself. I've been on more online meetings in the last few years than I care to even think about or remind myself of. And to be frank, the last thing that I get excited about is attending another online meeting of any type, shape, or size for any reason. So if someone's listening to this thinking, I don't care what they say, I'm not that interested in another online meeting totally fair. Totally understandable. One of the problems with the way a lot of events are hosted online or in person is they miss a big opportunity to create an experience where the learning goes beyond just being passive, where, hey, great ideas are great, right? We've all had something positive come from picking up on a great idea, but there's a limit to how much time we ought to spend just picking up great ideas before we do something with them, maybe in an interactive way, maybe experientially, maybe by thinking about what we're learning, talking about it with others, which leads to one of the things that makes what we do exchange different. And we've loved doing this with you all with your events it's not just about moving the learning from something that's passive to something that's a little bit more engaging and interactive. But how do we also continue to connect learners with each other? I mean, when we go to a meeting of any type, especially when we think about when we used to do it all in person, wasn't that one of the things that we loved the most? Was the connections that we'd build even before and during and after the learning was happening. So we, as you know, have figured out how to do that online, where we can recreate even those spontaneous collisions that happen in the hallways and over meals. So there will be all sorts of chances for folks to connect with others who are facing the same struggles, have the same aspiration, care about the same things, and have solutions for each other. And ultimately, we can do all that in a way where we almost forget that we're online. But we still don't have to have any pants on because which to me is a symbol of the benefits. If we can make learning, engaging and even entertaining and enjoyable, and if we can connect people and still build great relationships and get all that with the benefit of not still being able to be with my kids at night, of not having to get on a plane and sleep in another bed, then we're winning. That's awesome. So on a high level, in a nutshell, that's what we're passionate about. How do we enable learning connection, even that sense of belonging that many of us loved in person? How can we do it online, maybe even do it better than what we knew was possible with all the benefits of getting to be, you know, at home, I get to eat my own snacks, there are no lines in the bathrooms, etc... So I'm happy to answer any other questions that that might spark with you.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. You know, John, I think especially for the people who haven't attended before, you know, okay, we're recreating some of the network and interaction opportunities, right, in person that people appreciate. And I think we talk about the exchange approach. It's really the reason. Second, nature felt called to it, and why we didn't just want to do our best rendition of it. It was worth it to actually invest in working in partnering with a team like your team because it's so important because it optimizes for three things as we see it. One is a powerful connection, which you were talking about, powerful collaboration and powerful conversations and thinking about our industry, you know, really getting into that powerful connection, collaboration conversations that are going to move the industry forward, not just collectively, but one person at a time, one interaction at a time, you know, bringing the very best of what was, is and could be to those moments in interactions in a way that is energizing, invigorating, you know, type of experience. It's instead, a lot of people say they leave these events feeling inspired. A lot of people say they leave these events feeling connected right in a way that they were before, which isn't true for a lot of my meetings. But sometimes when you say, Hey, this hallway collision, somebody might be thinking of an online event where it's like you've got these cartoon characters connecting in a hallway or something that could you paint a little more picture of like, okay, I get the benefits. How does exchange do this? Or like, can you say a little bit more about that for people?
Jon Berghoff
Of course, super happy, too. And I'll give you an interesting example. I was facilitating the second day of a two-day conference recently that happened in person, and I showed up a day early. I was sitting in the back of the room. I wanted to watch the first day and what I'm about to describe is not going to be a surprise. And these were these are high-level executives for the biggest companies in the world. And during the first day, about half the day, half the room was on their phone the whole time. And why are they on their phone? Well, because the way that the whole day was designed was with speaker after speaker after speaker on stage. And once in a while, people look up. Once in a while there you can see engagement, but they're fading in and out. And on the second day that I led, it was a little bit different. I didn't tell people, Put your phones away. They actually didn't have a choice. Because what we did is we went from some teaching coming from the stage to then taking that teaching and saying, okay, what's relevant for you? What might you do with that? What problem does that solve or what question does that bring up? And then moving people into professionally designed and facilitated conversations as you said, we're in these conversations. It could be as simple as just sharing, Hey, what did we just learn? Or it could be beyond that, making commitments and declarations to How am I going to go take action could be a little bit more creative to participant sharing. Hey, based on that talk right there, here's a way that I'm going to innovate how I go create value as a property manager, and now all of a sudden you're generating new ideas together. And that's really cool because to put it simply, we're leveraging all of the experience that was already sitting there in the room. So we like to look at an audience not just as learners, but also as teachers to each other. So let's not get rid of all the great teachers and teachings that come from the so-called stage. Let's turn the whole room into a stage every once in a while where everybody gets to present meaningful ideas or ask meaningful questions to each other. And that starts to you talked about return on investment that multiplies it instantly. And again and again and again, every time we all get to kind of crowdsource ideas, crowdsource creative solutions, crowdsource, you know, new possibilities inspired by whatever was presented from the stage. So I don't know if that paints a little bit more of a picture, but, you know, that's a little bit about what it can feel like and look like and sound like when we're doing this.
Andrew Smallwood
It does. It does. Yeah. Just the way we do this, as opposed to one person speaking at a time. There can be 50 conversations going on simultaneously. And what I've noticed about that is you get this whole diversity and spectrum of ideas and things you never would have imagined or one person could not have come up with on their own. That comes out of it. That's really special and really cool. So, John, I want to ask something else before we run out of time today, which is that we're working on this with you all. And I feel like we're going further and further in getting better and better at this and doing this together. So excited for what's going to happen in August, but, you know, our teams ask the question as we get more excited about this, is there a way we could triple down on the kind of impact right this could have and actually or even prime this in a way where it elevates what's going to happen those days in August. And as we started talking about that, we came up with this exponential leadership series that's going to be happening over the weeks to come. And my hope was you could share with people what that is, what we've got planned, what they can expect from that specifically.
Jon Berghoff
Yeah, really happy too. We're also looking forward to doing this with you all and the same way we talked about how at an event like the conference in August where we can create a level of engagement and connection and collaboration that can take it to a new level that's really different. We've also become equally interested in the work that we do in how we learn to deal with challenges and deal with levels of change that anybody who's listening to this right now if it's the year 2022 and you're listening this, you've probably dealt with as a property manager, you've probably dealt with challenges in the last couple of years professionally, maybe also personally, that you never imagined you would be dealing with. And what we almost accidentally found our way into Andrew, is we have become interested and curious and have been now sharing our answers around how we deal with the challenge as leaders, not leaders based on our title or how big our business or our team is. Although we've shared this work last week with an executive team at Google, three weeks before that with 300 senior leaders for the biggest companies in the world. But really, we're defining a leader here as anybody who is relied on, is that everything they do is influencing other people. It's influencing themselves. Right. And that influence is unavoidable. It's undeniable. So this is an open invitation for all of us to reevaluate. How do we deal with challenges? How do we deal with change? But more importantly, how do we deal with the levels of stress, maybe even at times the levels of self-doubt that come with challenges we've never faced. So we're super honored to be hosting these three workshops with you all on a topic you all have called Exponential Leadership, which is a fitting name that you'll notice. We often refer to it as conscious leadership and we'll explain that at the workshops. But in a nutshell, it's this How do we navigate moments when we're dealing with demands that are beyond the feeling that we have the resources to face those demands that ultimately can sometimes send us into spirals where we're at our worst? Right. I think about this not just at work, but even at home. I've got three kids and I teach this stuff. Andrew Like I'm talking about it with you. Like I've got my act together tonight. I'll be tired. My eight-year-old will say something, do something, or ask for something. And there's a chance that even though in my head I know there's a better response, I will unconsciously, reactively do something that even at the moment I might think there's I could be doing better right now. Probably all of us can relate to moments when we know better, but for whatever reason, we're not at our best at work. Over these three workshops, we're going to share the intersection of neuroscience, arts of stress, the neuroscience of dealing with change and challenge, and some really practical tools that have been around for a long time. But when we package it in a practical way, can turn moments of stress into an advantage that can help us to turn around a downward spiral, into an upward spiral so that if someone's listening and they're thinking, Well, I want to grow my property management business, I want to just be a better leader, or I just want to be better at home, whatever it is, we're going to share some practical tools to turn these difficult moments into moments when we can actually be at our very best. So we're really looking forward to that. We're honored that you invited us to share this workaround conscious leadership or what we've referred to here as exponential leadership. We can't wait to meet whoever is listening to this or watching this. These workshops are going to lead just like we talked about at the August conference. They're totally experiential. They're 100% live and you'll actually be learning with and from each other because the wisdom we believe is often in the room, not just coming from a few of the teachers who are also awesome, but everything we talked about around live experiential events in August. Everyone gets a taste of that during these workshops. So there you go.
Andrew Smallwood
That's really helpful, John. And I'll just add to this that in talking, you have talked to dozens of property management leaders about how we are doing our events and how we are creating content, how are we doing things that support them that may not be obvious, you know, the benefit to second nature of like why would we put on and do stuff like this? And so I just want to acknowledge a couple of things like why we passionately believe in doing this and why we've made some decisions to do things the specific way that we have. And one is there is a lot to learn like there's a lot of credibility in hearing executives at Google. I know Facebook, I know Nassar, the U.N., etc., and other clients that have hired exchange. And I think it's okay to share with people that they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring this training that people are going to be getting in the industry. You know, giving people access to that is something we felt like, hey, we can organize things to do to create a lot of value here. That would be difficult for somebody to be able to get on their own. And an important part of that, though, was, hey, not just lessons from what's going on in the world and outside the industry, but it's important to make that relevant and make that practical to the industry. Sometimes we'll go to a conference event and see there's a speaker who may be speaking about general leadership development concepts or things like that, and it can feel hard to connect the dots sometimes to, okay, how can I apply this in my day to day work, right? And how is this going to work in this property management context? And when you are doing that, this is facilitated in such a way that you're next to peers doing that work together. It just immediately transforms into an incredibly relevant experience for people that can create transformation, even in real-time before the event is over, people can start to sense a change in how they're thinking, how they're planning, and what they're going to be doing, and even made some progress or some steps even before they've left. And for us, it's less about information sharing and much more about the transformation taking place in this whole approach and what you all have planned. We are so excited about the outcomes and the feedback we expect to get. And John, even before we recorded this, we already had Laura telling me we already have 50 people registered somehow. I don't know how that happened.
Jon Berghoff
They found the link on the sidewalk somewhere.
Andrew Smallwood
It must be. But we're very excited to see we know hundreds of people, you know, are going to be registering for this stuff over the coming months. We're really excited to see the outcome and impact. And I want to acknowledge one more thing, which is I just want to thank the executive team for second nature, the entire team at second nature because, in years past, we've made a commitment to not do this event as a for-profit event. It's actually done as a benefit, really a benefit to Napa and their charity this year. The charities make a wish. And for the third year in a row, despite the increasing investment we are continuing to make 100% of the proceeds of TWL acts will be going to support Make-A-Wish and we expect to raise some five-figure numbers like we have in years past and have an exciting impact. And I just love the idea of, hey, our whole industry coming together for connection, collaboration, conversation, and real transformation happening. That's going to move people forward where the rate of change outside the business, I mean, just in real estate, we've seen mortgage rates go from 3% to 6%. And in six months, we're seeing all kinds of things change. There's a new technology, there's competition coming in different ways. And, you know, it can feel overwhelming at times of like, how do I keep track of all this and what can I do? But this is a group of people, if you're coming to this, you'll be surrounded by people who are committed to saying, we want the rate of change inside of our business. We want the rate of change and how we are personally developing as leaders and what we're able to create as an organization to exceed the rate of change that's happening outside of our business. And that to us is why that exponential leadership, you know, the title was important and intentional when we selected it. So just know that. So you're going to be surrounded by professional property management professionals from all across the country. You're guaranteed to meet somebody new. You're likely to meet a friend if you've been on these before. And we're very excited to have you, John. I wanted to get that out, but anything else you would say or that you feel is important if you didn't come up earlier?
Jon Berghoff
Well, I was looking forward to hosting all these events with you and our team hosting them. You know, before you and I got on just now. But just listening to what you just shared, I'm even more enthusiastic about how much I believe everyone's going to enjoy these experiences. And when you talk about relevance, you know, property management and real estate, these are not the only industries facing a lot of change, but they are certainly facing a level of change that is significant. And I'm sure anybody watching or listening to this can feel that and your observation that sometimes it can feel like the world is changing faster than we're equipped to deal with that. You know, that's a really interesting idea. And I honor all of you as second nature for you talk about being a triple-win property manager. You know you choose to use these events to contribute to a deeply meaningful charitable cause. You leaning into a topic that is people helping navigate their inner world in the face of stress, challenge, and unprecedented levels of change. Like that's a deeply personal win that you are hoping we can create together through these workshops. So I appreciate you are choosing to be different. You know what you're doing. You could easily say, Why would we do any of this? This is the business we're in? Well, it seems like the business you're in is creating a level of value that no one else is filling. And we're super honored to be a partner with you in that way.
Andrew Smallwood
John, thank you for that. I think we'll end it there if you're looking for details about where to register, etc., where is this link that 50 people found ahead of time?
Jon Berghoff
Just grab a link. Any link.
Andrew Smallwood
It's out there. Maybe you'll just find it on your own. But we should have that in the show notes or in the outro, whatever is attached to this episode. And I just want to give a special thank you, John, to we're here on this call but 99% like I'll give myself maybe 1% credit or John, you know, we'll take 1% credit, but 99% of what's going to happen here, I want to give big thanks to Laura mack on the second nature team and many other people on the second nature team as well.
Jon Berghoff
Yes, that's for Laura.
Andrew Smallwood
That's for Laura, the chimes, and Adaire, Steve, there are so many people on the exchange team who are going to be contributing to this. And importantly, all of you, the 50 people who have already committed to being there, you know, and those of you listening to us now or deciding and making a choice to spend a little time and get a big return from it, how you show up and you're going to see what you get, what you bring to this and what you give to this is going to have a big impact on other people's experience. And we love the idea of all that coming together. So more information around this or I could point directions, links will probably pop up or who knows what will happen if it's in the video, in the show notes, and audio. But thanks for your time today, John. Really appreciate it. And to everybody else, we'll see you in the events to come.
Jon Berghoff
Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.
Andrew Smallwood
That's all for today's triple-win Property Management podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for sharing a piece of your life with us. We do not take it for granted. I also want to give a shout-out to Carol Housel for everything she and our team does to make this possible. It's crazy to think about. Over 5000 professional property managers have pressed play on episodes and season one and season two now, and we really want to encourage you to keep giving feedback because more and more people are listening. It's getting better and better and better thanks to everything that you're sharing with us. If you liked this enough to listen, I want to encourage you to share it with other people. You can give us feedback directly on these social media channels, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and wherever you're hanging out, you can also send us an email. It's like an intercom and we just want to give more. We're there's no sales pitch here. Just want to offer more resources that help you find and stack the next triple-win and become a triple-win-driven property manager. So where can you find that? You can find a private Facebook group, you can find our blog, you can find our newsletters to find more resources all at RBP.secondnature.com to search for what you're looking for there, and every time we see you, we want to see a better version of you and your business. To that end, keep it going, feel inspired, take our encouragement and we'll see you next time.
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