SOPs for Real Estate Investors: Ryan Pease Reveals the Secret to Scaling

Ryan (00:00)
Systems are naturally geared towards failure. A system is automatically geared towards failure as soon as it begins, as soon as it’s born, a system is set to fail. And so if you don’t maintain it,

If you don’t actively maintain it, that system will eventually fail. And so that’s where I come in and that’s where I provide my services to business owners. I’m kind of like the yard, the lawn guy that takes care of the lawn at the house. You know what I’m saying? So.

Kristen Knapp (00:21)
Yeah.

That’s amazing. And is it you kind of consulting with people and helping like being hands on, or is it a software that people can kind of figure things out themselves?

Ryan (00:30)
So there are a million different softwares you can use. You can use Confluence, can use ⁓ Whale, you can use Notion, you can use something as simple as Google, you can use Microsoft SharePoint, you can use a ton of tools. You can even use your desktop. There’s no wrong answer. There are just kind of good, better, and best answers in terms of storing documentation and how to use it.

Kristen Knapp (02:26)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen Knapp and I’m here with Ryan Pease, the founder of SOP Mojo. We’re going to get all into how to streamline your workflow. He’s going to tell us all about his ⁓ new business and I’m excited to get into it. Thank you for being here, Ryan.

Ryan (02:40)
Of course, happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Kristen.

Kristen Knapp (02:42)
Yeah, so I’d love to just get into kind of the hole you saw in the market and why you started building this.

Ryan (02:48)
Absolutely. So I’ve known, I’ve grown up around business owners my entire life. I’ve worked with business owners, I’ve worked with contractors, so I’m active duty military. And I have worked with contractors, DoD contractors throughout my entire career. I’ve done systemization and standardization for the better part of the last 15 years. And so operations is kind of my world. It’s my bread and butter. And so, you know,

What I’ve seen in the marketplace is that there’s really a need to outsource systems and standardization and automation. And so I’m not necessarily an automation expert, but what I am good at is documenting information and taking it and providing that to individuals. And so that’s what I’ve done for the last 15 years is just become really good at documenting and transferring knowledge. So taking knowledge from one person and handing it off to somebody else.

And that’s, that’s just a gap that I think will always be there in the business world and the corporate space. but also in the real estate investing space, I don’t think there, can’t, you know, swing a dead cat without hitting some app or some person that’s, that’s offering services for automation. but automation is great, but if you don’t have systems built or, your, processes documented before you go into the automation phase, you’re kind of throwing money down the toilet.

And so I feel like there’s definitely a need for that.

Kristen Knapp (04:04)
Yeah, and can you kind of explain the difference there, like between the automation and the actual systems behind them?

Ryan (04:09)
Absolutely. So typically how it works is you have, you know, you have to have a system in order for you to automate it, right? If you have a specific set of steps, you have to be able to ⁓ understand those steps before you can hand it off to somebody to automate those steps for you. If you plan on automating those yourself, you still have to take the time to document everything, document the steps in the sequential order that you need.

in order to get those steps automated. So automation is all about handing it off to a robot or to some system that does the work by itself. But before you can even get into that step, you have to understand the system that you need to automate. And so I’d say there’s a huge gap in that because a lot of times what we hear from like gurus and some of these other YouTube channels, not this one necessarily, but a lot of other YouTube channels that exist out there.

They talk a lot about systems and they talk a lot about automation, but what they don’t talk about are the necessary steps that it takes to actually get to that point. And that all starts with documentation. So if you don’t have standard operating procedures, if you don’t have a way to convey the steps that need to be taken, there’s no way you can really automate. And so that’s kind of the difference there between just documenting and automating and systems. But a system is really nothing more than

just a set of steps that has to occur before you get an outcome. And so you always have an input. So your input may be, you know, ⁓ whatever effort that you put forth towards the thing. And then you have a process and that process may consist of one step. It could consist of 30 steps. It could be very simple. It could be super complex.

and then it has to go through that system, has to go through those series of steps before you can get some sort of outcome. And so that is the entirety of the process. So you have inputs, you have a process, and then you have an output. And so in order to automate those things, you first have to understand your inputs, then you have to understand the steps that it takes, and then you’re able to put something, and then you’re able to get an output out of that.

Kristen Knapp (06:56)
Yeah, mean, it sounds like it’s great that people like you are figuring this out and doing it for people, because that sounds very complicated.

Ryan (07:04)
It certainly

can be. And I think a lot of real estate investors are really chasing passive income. ⁓ But a lot of times their businesses are anything but passive because you’re having to put in so much work and so much effort to build the deal, to maintain the deal, and then to find the exit strategy for that deal and then everything in between. so not understanding those steps and not having the…

Kristen Knapp (07:11)
Right?

Ryan (07:28)
the knowledge behind that makes it a big challenge. a lot of times, know, and this is the case with any industry, not just real estate investing. And so that’s why I can kind of speak to this, but you know, you got new people that come in and do it. And a lot of times they come in guns ablaze and they feel like they know what they need to do because we’re taught, you know, just take action and you’ll figure out the rest later, which is absolutely great. And I don’t disagree with that. But once you decide to take action, you have to start documenting things.

so that you know what works and so you know what doesn’t. And so if you fail to document things along that path, what you’re gonna do is end up spinning your wheels and you’re gonna lose a lot of money and time and effort and you’re gonna have to repeat a lot of steps. so businesses waste so much time recreating the steps and redoing the steps that they’ve already done in the past. And so just the simple act of writing something down and maintaining it.

is super, super important. you know, one thing that people don’t really think about is the process of documenting information and maintaining it, which in and of itself is a process and it can be challenging and daunting for a lot of people, especially, especially new folks, you know, as they get into business ownership, they’re wearing like 30 hats and they have to really just maintain, you know, some semblance of sanity. And the way that you do that is you start writing things down and handing those things off.

other people so that you can take off a hat and give it to somebody else.

Kristen Knapp (08:47)
Yeah, so it’s not only helping with efficiency, but also consistency. So people can kind of repeat their operations over and over with no gaps in between.

Ryan (08:57)
Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re doing a flip, for example, let’s use rentals. I think that’s a better use case. So if you have a bunch of apartment complexes that you’re renovating and you’re out all the carpet and putting in new carpet, how efficient would it be if you were to pull out all the carpet and then you have to go through a catalog and figure out, okay, for this, want to use this carpet. And then each and every time you’re trying to figure out what carpet you need to use. It’s more efficient to actually have

the same carpet in each house or each apartment complex or each apartment. That way there’s no thought process behind it. You already have a system in place that enables you to use a specific carpet, a specific paint color, specific lighting, that kind of thing, just to make things consistent. And if you do that and you have that documented in an SOP, like you said, what you get is a consistent outcome. know everything becomes predictable and you know what your outcome is going to be.

Kristen Knapp (10:24)
That’s amazing. So you’ve been working in SOPs for a really long time. What led you to actually making this business?

Ryan (10:31)
So again, just because of the fact that I was raised around business owners and mostly in the agriculture space. So my parents are actually beekeepers, believe it or not, it’s kind of interesting, they, know, shout out to Clark bees, if you like honey. But my parents are beekeepers, but I’ve also known real estate investors and I’ve worked with them to build out some of their systems in the past. Nothing too complicated, but I’ve seen a lot of gaps in business ownership in terms of knowledge management.

If you think about, and I look at this through the lens of the Air Force, which is the branch of service that I’m currently in. So if you think about the act that we just performed over Iran, right? We just bombed nuclear sites in Iran. You can’t do that without systems. All the things that took place before that are because somebody documented something. And so you’re able to reference a lot of that stuff. You’re able to train.

⁓ and real estate investing in business is no different. And so my parents, they owned a business and I have consulted with them a lot. There are other businesses in defense and aerospace that I’ve consulted, pro bono. So this was before I ever got into owning the business. I did, ⁓ just because I know the stuff. And, ⁓ you know, I’ve spent the last 15 years just documenting things and transferring knowledge from one person to another, because continuity is a big piece that you have, have to have in the military because we just constantly move. And so.

If I’m in a leadership position and I have stewardship over a mass of individuals, have to be able to, once I’m replaced, I have to sit down next to the guy that’s replacing me and say, hey, these are some of the things that you need to look out for. These are some of the things that have worked for me. And this is some of the information that you need to have on hand as you take over. so the business is no different. ⁓ If you go into the corporate world,

It’s really important to have some of those things documented so that your successors can also succeed and maybe even take that information and improve upon it. And those documents become living documents and the business continues to grow. And if you don’t write it down, businesses don’t scale. So businesses will stall if you don’t write things down. And that’s the case with real estate. That’s the case with logistics. Any business, it doesn’t matter. ⁓ If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t go anywhere.

And if the knowledge is maintained in one person’s head and it’s not transferred to somebody else, then you’re just constantly spinning your wheels and your profitability tanks.

Kristen Knapp (12:46)
Yeah, and it sounds like you’re kind of hitting two sides with this where there’s of course the documentation part, but there’s also the delegation part, which is also really important to scale a business.

Ryan (12:55)
Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s super important that not only as you document, right, you take the documentation, you can’t sit in a drawer. If it’s stagnant, then you can’t use the information. It has to be usable information. And you take that documentation and you can either delegate, you can automate, or you can eliminate. So there are things that you can document. There are things that you can delegate, right? So if I get some information and I’m able to write it down or a process that has worked for me in the past,

Kristen Knapp (13:02)
Right.

Ryan (13:22)
I can then take that information, hand it off to the next guy and they’re able to run with it so that I can focus my time as the leader of the organization or the business owner on revenue generating activities while they’re taking care of sales calls or ⁓ answering customer complaints and things like that. And so I can focus on making sales. When it comes to automation, you can take that process that’s been documented and you can hand it to an automation specialist who builds the software or systems and

And in the real estate investing space, there’s no shortage of software tools that you can find out there. so those have all been born out of systems that people have written down and used, and they were manually doing the things. And then eventually they said, you know what? I’m tired of doing these manual things. It’s time for me to hand this off to somebody else. And they probably delegated it first. And then they got tired of hiring and firing people and managing people and things like that. So they…

Kristen Knapp (14:08)
Yeah.

Ryan (14:57)
turned to a software engineer and said, hey, can you develop this? And then they automated that. And then as you go throughout that process, you always want to look at ways to improve it. And so if you look at a system, there are always things that you can pluck out that are non-value added. And so if you do that, then you become lean. And so turning your organization from kind of this chaotic kind of crisis-filled, putting out fires constantly thing,

to eventually you have this really lean process that you can then use and hand off to other people or systems to take that on for you. And here’s one more thing that I think is extremely important. I’m sure your listeners have taken on deals where they’ve bought a home and the lawn is almost touching the roof because it hasn’t been touched in forever, right? And you can’t find the walkway.

to save your life and so you’re having to chop it all down so that you can actually see the walkway. Well, what happens if you purchase that property and you clean up the property, you make it look nice, you mow the grass and you find the walkway and you can find your way to the door and you can get inside, And so that’s what you want for your new buyers that actually end up purchasing or renting the property from you. Well, if over time you fail to maintain that property, it’s gonna happen again where that sidewalk is no longer visible

and people get lost, you’re not able to find the entrance to the place or just look shabby and nobody’s going to want it. Systems are exactly the same way in business. So as you build systems in your business, you have to maintain them. And it’s really painful. It really is. And there’s no getting around it. And that’s why a lot of businesses don’t like to do it because it’s such ⁓ a huge hassle. paying your employees to maintain those systems.

can become a hassle too because you’re taking them away. It’s usually an alternate duty for employees, right? Hey, while you do that, you’re the subject matter expert. I want you to go ahead and write everything down. And then I want you to maintain the documentation on it. Well, what happens over time is chaos always takes over.

are naturally geared towards failure. A system is automatically geared towards failure as soon as it begins, as soon as it’s born, a system is set to fail. And so if you don’t maintain it,

If you don’t actively maintain it, that system will eventually fail. And so that’s where I come in and that’s where I provide my services to business owners. I’m kind of like the yard, the lawn guy that takes care of the lawn at the house. You know what I’m saying? So.

Kristen Knapp (17:12)
Yeah.

That’s amazing. And is it you kind of consulting with people and helping like being hands on, or is it a software that people can kind of figure things out themselves?

Ryan (17:21)
So there are a million different softwares you can use. You can use Confluence, can use ⁓ Whale, you can use Notion, you can use something as simple as Google, you can use Microsoft SharePoint, you can use a ton of tools. You can even use your desktop. There’s no wrong answer. There are just kind of good, better, and best answers in terms of storing documentation and how to use it.

But really what you want to do is reduce the friction.

⁓ of how to gain access to that knowledge. And the way that you reduce that friction is you increase the ease at which it’s accessed. And so, for example, I have a computer and on my computer I have my desktop and I have all my information stored on my desktop. Well, if Sally over there needs access to the files on my desktop, she has to walk over here, kick me off my desktop and look at it. If I have a cloud’s, know,

a cloud solution that stores all of our files in an organized way and everybody knows how to access those files, it reduces that friction by which information is able to be accessed. And that’s kind of how it’s done. I don’t have a software personally, but I use other third party softwares to manage information. And it’s kind of at the choice of the business owner. However, they want to access that information and use that information. If they’re already using tools, what we can do is go in there,

and organize it and put it out there in such a way that it makes a lot more sense. It’s more intuitive for the team. And what we don’t want to do is cost the business owner a bunch of expense on starting with this new tool and having to migrate everything over and do all this kind of craziness. But we do want to reduce friction for both the business owner and for the employees that work in the business because again, that access to information is kind of the currency for a successful business.

And if you don’t have access to that information, then you’re not really able to continue forward. And so that’s what we do, but we also build knowledge management systems. So I build SharePoint sites, I build Google sites. I can build your confluence. I can build all sorts of different tools. It’s really whatever you decide. And then the other thing that I provide is kind of a monthly fee for SOP services and for your listeners, I’d be willing to give them a discount on that.

as well if they go to sopmojo.com slash resources, I can give them a discount on their services. But also they can email me directly at ryan at sopmojo.com and I’d be willing to have a conversation with them.

Kristen Knapp (19:41)
Yeah, I mean, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for providing that discount. I feel like, you know, if you need your systems, Ryan’s your guy for sure. And I feel like you’re really helping people get out of the weeds of their business and actually do the things they want to do.

Ryan (19:53)
That’s right. You know, Michael Gerber, if you haven’t read the book, the E-Myth Revisited, it’s an amazing book. And he’s the one that really kind of, I guess, wrote the book on systems and getting out of your business so that you can focus on making money through your business. So ⁓ yeah, this is kind of one of those services.

Kristen Knapp (20:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, and you’ve really worked with a variety of industries and you’ve really proven this. So, you know, bringing it to the real estate market, I feel like it’s totally ready to just help people change their business.

Ryan (20:22)
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m happy to help out whoever needs help to document their systems. And even from a consulting standpoint, I’m happy to do that as well.

Kristen Knapp (20:32)
Amazing. Awesome. Well, then what’s next for the business? I know it’s fairly young, but where do you go from here?

Ryan (20:38)
So from here, what I would like to do is expand it to other sectors. beyond the industries that I’ve mentioned, I’d love to kind of help out your viewers as well. And so that’s why I’m offering that discount, but ⁓ expanding my team. So my team needs to be expanded too. So I’m a business, so I need systems. I’m building systems for my business as we speak. It’s a fairly new business. And so as I go throughout the process of doing what I’m doing for other businesses, I’m documenting things for myself.

so that I can better provide those services to my clients. And so as the next year or so comes, my hope is to continue building and helping out more clients.

Kristen Knapp (21:14)
That’s amazing. Well, you’re so knowledgeable on the topic and I think anybody who needs help with this should definitely come to you. Remind them one more time how to find you.

Ryan (21:21)
All right, so you can email me at ryan at sopmojo.com or you can just go to my website, www.sopmojo.com. And if you go to sopmojo.com forward slash resources, you can get your discounted resources there, services, sorry. And if you go to sopmojo.com slash course,

I’m actually putting together a course if you don’t want to pay the monthly fee, if you don’t want to engage with me, if you’re kind of an introvert and you’d rather learn on your own and do it on your own pace. I’ll be launching a course in September and you can get 50 % off that course if you sign up now.

Kristen Knapp (21:56)
that’s amazing. Yeah, so two options for people. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here, Ryan. I really appreciate it.

Ryan (22:02)
Well, hey, Kristen, I really appreciate your time and thanks to Mike and the team for putting this together and thanks for having me on the show.

Kristen Knapp (22:04)
Yeah.

Awesome, well thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time. Please reach out to Ryan. It sounds like he has a lot of value to provide. So yeah, reach out to him. Thank you so much. Bye.

Ryan (22:16)
All right, thank you.