Get to Know Your Hosts

51 min

Show notes

Good Operators is a weekly podcast about the people who run residential property management companies.

Somebody in property management already solved the problem that is about to cost you a year. You will never meet them. The expensive lessons stay locked inside the company that learned them, and the next operator pays full price all over again. This show is built to change that. One guest per episode, an operator, a vendor or a consultant, and a real conversation about how they built it, what broke, the real numbers, and what it took.

This first episode is about the two people who will be asking the questions, before any guest comes on.

Tim Wehner got into property management by accident and never left. He almost skipped the 7am networking event where he met Duke Dodson. He took a two-week job covering for a departing receptionist and walked out seventeen years later. He started at 118 units under management as roughly employee number two. By the 2022 merger with Evernest, Dodson Property Management was at about 8,500 units under management and 180 employees. He ran for the NARPM executive committee three times, lost twice, quit, got talked out of quitting, and was national president of NARPM in 2023. He is Head of Acquisitions at Rising Tide.

Blake Mohseni came at it from the other direction and on purpose. He grew up in a family of immigrant entrepreneurs and credits them for the part he says you cannot teach: you just keep showing up. One question kept coming back to him anyway. There has to be a better way to do this. He answered it with an industrial engineering degree and an MBA in finance, operating roles across Fortune 100 manufacturing, sales, technology and finance, and three years consulting for small and mid-sized businesses. He founded Rising Tide, which buys local property management companies and keeps them local.

They get into how each of them landed in this industry, why property management is a human business before it is anything else, what actually breaks as a company scales past a few hundred doors, and the question every operator is entitled to ask an outsider buying into their industry: who the hell are you?

Near the end Blake says what the whole show is for: go carry this forward, and pay it forward to the small business owner. What one operator learned the hard way should reach the next one. That is how this industry gets better.

Recorded in GC Realty's studio in Chicago, thanks to Mark Ainley, who introduced the two of them.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open
0:45 Intro
2:33 The books and ideas they share most
7:02 How Tim Wehner got into property management by accident
13:25 Losing the NARPM race twice before winning it
20:43 Why property management is not just a user experience
28:36 Why Blake Mohseni chose property management
40:40 "Who the hell are you?" and why operators distrust outside buyers

Mentioned in this episode

Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street (2:33)
Rules for My Unborn Son (3:45)
The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene (25:46)
Atomic Habits, by James Clear (26:04)
Founders podcast with David Senra (41:15)
NARPM, the National Association of Residential Property Managers (13:25)
Mark Ainley and GC Realty (17:27)