Welcome Home Milwaukee Property Management manages around 450 doors, primarily single family homes and duplexes, with a vision of having a positive impact on the community in Milwaukee by improving neighborhoods and benefiting the community in many ways.

Welcome Home has a team of 20 employees, the majority of whom work remotely. Ed Riggenbach knew from the start that he would need something to help him stay on track.

They started with Todoist, but it wasn’t too long before they moved out of it into Asana. However, Ed found that Asana required too much manual effort to keep it running smoothly.

“So we jumped into Asana. [We were] pretty happy with that for a handful of years, but there was just a piece missing and it was too manual. There was no opportunity to see the fork in the road (just little things like is a tenant moving out or renewing their lease?), and that's something that LeadSimple was able to help with. …One of the main things that we were looking to solve is removing the human error potential, and the main thing we were seeing is because so many things were manual in Asana, our team was just not starting stuff, and the process just wasn't getting going. …We just needed to remove some of the human aspect from it, and that's been super helpful.”

Welcome Home Milwaukee has used LeadSimple as their CRM for many years, so when he heard about LeadSimple Operations, Ed was interested. However, he chose to wait until the busy season was over to begin implementing. 

“But then it was awesome when we came back ten months later and looked at it again, the amount of improvements and changes and things that your team had added to it was just shocking - how much you did in ten months, and then now, during the six months since we started, how many new things, changes, and improvements have come out, has just been wildly impressive.”

When asked what it was like helping his team navigate the transition to LeadSimple, Ed responded:

“Transitioning to this wasn't as difficult because we had a similar process product in place. Yeah, technology change is always difficult and there's no secret sauce to it. There's no flipping a switch or anything. It was and still is consistent followup, team meetings, department meetings - LeadSimple really runs our meetings, going through the projects in there, seeing who has tasks behind or overdue.”

“I think that it’s worth it to have the team be more involved and I think you just get better buy-in when people are able to help build the process versus when they are just forced to use something.”

Now the team is able to focus on completing the most important tasks rather than being tied only to the urgent.

“It's really reinforcing, do what's important and not what's urgent, which is pretty difficult in property management because you have so many phone calls, text messages and G-chats flying around that it's easy to get lost in the weeds, and then we don't do the stuff that actually matters.”

Ed’s favorite things about LeadSimple are:

✅ Email templates & automation

“Automatic emails go out, again, to remove the human error or the manual piece, and the more we can make this stuff automatic, the more our team is freed up and they don't have to click as many buttons so they can have more human conversations and talk to residents.”

✅ Conditional logic 

“Knowing what direction to go in the road, was one of the big areas that LeadSimple helps with.”

✅ The ability to build a better customer experience into their processes and make his team’s lives easier

“I don't think we are ever going to hit the bottom of the opportunities to continue to tweak and use LeadSimple to give a better customer service experience, but then also to just make it a more enjoyable job; property management can burn people out pretty quick, just because there's so many small little things that the to-do list never ends. We want to make that automated, so that way our customer service can be more human in the areas that need to matter.”

Ed is also beginning to use LeadSimple to manage his recruiting, hiring, and employee performance review processes.

“We’re at the very beginning stages, but I think we're moving to a direction where basically our entire company can be run out of LeadSimple.”

Ed’s advice to other property managers looking to wade into the problem of documenting and streamlining their processes is:

“It's one of those things where, especially if you don't have much documented, even if you do, it can just feel like an overwhelming process that is easy to push off because you don't have 20 hours and just dedicate a time. … So just start, even if it's just a Google doc on your own or a napkin of this is the bullet, the high level bullet points of our process, to have that, and then when you get back to it, like just continue to incrementally move it forward.”

Now that Welcome Home Milwaukee is using LeadSimple, Ed says that consistency has been the biggest benefit to his clients and his team. 

“I think it probably means more to our clients than anything else. One of the biggest things we've tried to focus on is whether I do it or Angie does it, we want to make it seem like this is the Welcome Home way. So having things consistently show up in the same format and using LeadSimple to confirm our terminology. If I have one word for something and the rest of our team says it a different way, it removes that consistency, and when you lose consistency, I think that is when you start to lose trust, because people aren't as sure of what you're talking about. So, keeping us more consistent has just given us more confidence.”

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