In sales for nearly a quarter century, Bobby Russo was the quintessential road warrior. Then he got remarried to a woman who wanted to start a family. Settling in Hershey, Pennsylvania, they had two boys — Caleb (now almost 4) and Cory (now almost 2). Something had to give. “I travelled roughly 165,000 miles per year, 235 hotel nights per year,” Russo recalls. “Four years ago, I remarried. And I married a younger woman who wanted children.” In October 2012, Russo came home from another long stint on the road. A successful businessman, Russo had built up a sporting goods company, sold it in 2000 after eight years, and retired at age 36. He was lured out of retirement in 2002 to become North American sales manager for a large multinational electronics company, a position he held for a decade. When Russo came back home for a few days in late 2012, his wife sat him down and asked him two questions that changed his life for the better. “’What are you doing?’” he recalls her asking him. “‘You’ve got two beautiful kids. You don’t need to do this. Why don’t you retire and spend more time with your family?’” Russo did just that. “Caleb, who was three, was saying, ‘Daddy come home. Daddy, come home,’ and every time we’d pass a black Lincoln Town Car, he’d say, ‘Daddy, don’t go to the airport,’ because that’s what would come to the house to take me to the airport. And every time he saw one, he’d go, ‘Daddy, don’t leave.’ And then we’d see an airplane, and he’d say, ‘Daddy, don’t leave.’ So that was tough.” He planned to relocate his young family to Charleston, South Carolina, putting down an offer on a house, and planning to take the next decade off until his boys began high school. Then Russo’s father got wind of his son’s plans. “’You’re really retiring? What’s the big issue?’” he recalled his father asking him. “I told him it was travel,” Russo says. “There are only about 35 weeknights a year when I’m in my own bed, at home with my family. I don’t want to do what I did with Nikki [his 22 year-old daughter] and not be around all the time.” His father replied, “‘Well if the only issue’s travel, I need your help with this property management company I have out here [in Florence, Arizona]. We can run the business together.’” Russo had a short retirement. He and his family relocated to the Phoenix area in early 2013. Impulse Property Management, the company he took over, has 7 real estate agents, 2 property managers, and then the Russos as owners. They manage 122 buildings with 136 total units. In early 2013, however, his father had shoulder surgery and left the day-to-day operations of the property management business to the two property managers on staff. By April 1, when Bobby Russo was due to take over the property management side of the business, it was a mess. “I inherited a company with ticked off tenants because their deposits had been stolen. We had owners ticked off because we had property managers who weren’t paying owner payments, and we had no way of tracking payments if the owners called in. Our property managers were so confused, they blew off the owners. When I started on April 1, there were four messages on the voicemail from customers looking for information. In all, there were 25 messages going back two months. Checks were on the floor. Checks were piled on desks. Who’s current? We couldn’t get a rent roll to save our lives. No work orders were being used, so vendors were coming in and dropping off invoices, and an audit we did showed at least one vendor who had billed us for work he’d never done.” “We needed to completely turn around how people looked at this company,” Russo recalls. “Here we were, two basically retired guys with a business that’s worth something that maybe I can give to my kids someday, and a market (property management) that’s growing — it’s the fastest growing segment of the real estate business. Owners and tenants needed 24/7 access to their accounts, to be able to list vacant houses, owners should be able to see the houses are listed right away, how we market them and what we’re doing, and they should be able to see the rental applications. They need to have full visibility into our activities.” When Russo took over the business on April 1, he knew he needed to clean house. “I looked at the accounting in our legacy property management software program, and it was a disaster. I called them up. I saw $700,000 in security deposits, $800,000 in income, leases with no expiration dates.There was no double entry bookkeeping going on. The legacy property management software company said we’d need to do a complete reset of the software, wipe out all the data, and start out as if we were a brand new company. I said to them, ‘If I’m going to do that, I’m going to do it with another company.’” “So I started calling around to other property management software companies,” Russo recalls. He even called Salesforce.com, which his previous company had used as an early adopter since 2005, to see if they could help him manage the property management side of the business. “On the real estate side of the business, they’d be perfect,” he says, “but for property management, all they could really provide is a cloud background, and creating as custom solution for us would have cost at least $50,000.”
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