Bringing All Systems Together in Property Management with Jason Griffith, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Synco

Nate Smoyer (00:01.644)
Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Griffith (00:02.944)
Nate. Thank you, Nate. Good to see

Nate Smoyer (00:05.538)
Good to have you here. I know I mentioned just in the pre -show that I'm on the cusp of the start of the Sturgis rally. I'm literally itching to get outside and to ride. I'm just kind of curious, what do you do during the summer? What's your hobby, your passion of choice?

Jason Griffith (00:23.798)
Yeah, I like traveling. So, you know, we like to take the family out and try and see new parts of the world. And I just, I know, I know I could make it. You're have to give me a hat. that sounds awesome to me.

Nate Smoyer (00:32.321)
Come to the Sturgis Rally, you got time.

I've got two motorcycles so we could have a lot of fun. Here we

Well, good stuff. I'm excited to have you on the show here. And I think we're going to have a lot of fun here for everyone listening. a proper intro here. got Jason Griffiths, co -founder and co -CEO at a company called Synco. Synco founded just two years ago, 2022, as a real -time messaging platform specifically built for property management teams. It works by connecting office staff, onsite workers, third -party vendors, and empowers the team really

collaborate instantly, organize conversations, and really cover topics like your property management projects, issues, updates, and we're gonna dig into all that and more. But there's one thing I wanna start with that I thought was really very interesting to me and intriguing, and it's actually not necessarily, Cinco, it's on you. Your title is co -CEO, and this is not the first time you've been co -CEO.

I'm sure you have to be familiar with the criticisms that come with that. How does that

Jason Griffith (01:52.014)
Yeah, so look, my background is I had started a company called SiteComply back in 2010, which was particularly significant in the New York City market. And my co -founder in that venture was Ross Goldenberg, who's a co -founder in Cinco. And we built that business over a year, and we were co -CEOs of that business.

Jason Griffith (02:20.718)
genesis of how we got to Cinco, then talk about the co -CEO thing. When Ross and I, after building that business over a decade, we sold it to inhabit the group that owns folks like Resmin and AnyoneHome, et cetera. When we left that business in 2019, 2020, we came together with two other great guys, Bill Evick and John Bonds, who are the founders of AppTex.

early innovator and rent payments, especially mobile payments and the like. And the four of us after selling our businesses to inhabit started to talk about, you know, what was, what was next. And, know, to your point, Ross and I were co -founders and co -CEOs for a decade. And I think, as you said, it's not always easy, but

You know, I think it just, worked very, very well. And now in Cinco, Bill and I are, well, we have four co -founders and Bill and I are co -CEOs. And, you know, I think it, it allows you to cover more ground. It does come with its, you know, challenges and opportunities. And I think it's, it's really about being clear on kind of the roles and responsibilities and how you sort of divide up the work. And.

You know, I think the most important thing though is the relationship among co -founders, right? I mean, yes, we've co -CEOs, but having co -founders, I really feel like it gives us an edge. know, each of us have distinct skill sets and the four of us are, you know, regularly coming together to discuss each of our strong points. mean, Bill knows the national market. Bill was actually a number employee.

Nate Smoyer (03:48.852)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (04:09.102)
I may have this one or two digits off 72 at Yardy. He's been around the industry for a long, time. John Bonds was a systems integrator for all the major, you know, property management software solutions out there. Ross is a product expert, he's a part -time professor at Columbia teaching innovation. And I've been in the world of prop tech for a while myself building,

companies that I think really create new categories and help bring innovations to this industry, which I love, which is filled with complexity and opportunity and sometimes lack of innovation. So I like a good challenge. It's nice to have friends with you when you do it, talented.

Nate Smoyer (05:00.524)
Very cool, yeah. What's the saying, if you wanna go fast, go it alone, if you wanna go far, go with other, I don't know, something along those lines.

Jason Griffith (05:10.836)
Yeah, something like that. It sounds good. I agree.

Nate Smoyer (05:14.04)
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think that what that boils down and probably that you're the right person then to be tackling the topic of communications. Because I think with any team, regardless, co -founders or just team members, like communication, clarity, understanding everyone on the same playing field has to be crystal clear.

Jason Griffith (05:37.88)
Funny thing about that, this is the first time in my career that I'm a user of my own product. Before it's always been, imagine if you were using this product and I think actually most companies are kind of in that position where they're building something for someone else's use. We use Syncgo every day for our own team. If somebody told me that I had to go back to the world of email and texting to get complicated work

done, I don't know how I would do it. So that's why I think it's easier to be out there in the market so passionately talking about the solution because I use it, I live it every day, and if I was a property manager, I don't know how I would operate without

Nate Smoyer (06:20.812)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (06:30.839)
You'd mentioned the previous company you'd started, site comply. Obviously you've been around in the industry as well as your, your co -founders have been around the industry, all different types of angles over the course of the last like 10 or so years. What have you seen within property management is like the constant problems and challenges that you kind of alluded to some things are getting innovated, but also some things are not getting innovated and you know, how's that really.

impacted your thinking as to what problems should we attack and how that led to getting Cinco up and off the

Jason Griffith (07:06.082)
Yeah, so when we all sold our businesses, our last day at the office was actually just like three or four weeks before the world shut down for COVID. So it really gave us like, you know, some time to think and think about what we wanted to tackle next. I think we all felt like we really liked this industry. We really have a deep knowledge of it,

Nate Smoyer (07:16.742)
my goodness.

Jason Griffith (07:28.396)
We actually went in and started just interviewing our former clients and asking like, what are some of the challenges that you're feeling? And maybe it was the times that we were living in where suddenly people couldn't be in the office, difficult when you had sort of remote teams. But the thing that just kept on coming up over and over and over was this kind of amorphous problem of communication.

You know, I'll tell you, I sort of viewed it from a couple different angles. Number one, at SiteComply, we were the largest sender of email communication into the largest real estate market in the world. Like we would notify people of compliance events and we would see how teams would react to it. So it really did sink very well with what we started hearing in these interviews where folks would tell us, you know, the following. They would say, number one,

An average property manager has 300 emails in their inbox a day, 300 new ones, right? And that could be direct communications. It could be the regular like, I'll just CC everybody. That's a big cause of this because either you CC someone in email and they know about it, or you don't CC someone and they're in the dark about it. There's kind of no middle ground. It also could be exhaust, what we would call from other systems.

There's, as we've seen, there's been a proliferation of other technologies out there. So people have a million different apps and each of those apps then result in alerts and reports and emails constantly. So you have this overwhelming mass of emails and not only that, but if you look across the enterprise, it's not just email. It's email, it's texting, hey, did you get my email? Hey, this is really important, et cetera.

Nate Smoyer (08:53.378)
Right,

Jason Griffith (09:17.664)
it's sprinkling a little bit of Microsoft Teams in there. this team now started text group chatting on Teams. We're having this meeting and we're using Teams for that. you got email, you got texting, you have Teams. And believe it or not, almost every meeting I hear, I hear WhatsApp, right? yeah, the site staff, the site staff is using texting and WhatsApp. And so you sort of have all of these things.

The second thing that I heard is what's interesting is that these companies kind of felt that they lived in two different worlds. On the one hand, they have the world of property management software where everything is organized, right? The way that they work. If you bring a new property manager and they want to know did unit 3J pay the rent, like that's not a hard thing to do. You go in the software, you click the building, you click 3J, there it is. But if you were to say, hey,

Nate Smoyer (10:10.124)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (10:12.876)
I'd like to see the history of all of our team communication around unit 3J. Well, that's impossible, right? Cause that's in an email and a text and a WhatsApp and a Teams message. And by the way, maybe it's on a phone of someone who left the business. High turnover in this industry kind of makes everything worse. And then the last thing that I would say is maybe more about kind of the divide between headquarters and

where it kind of feels like the site staff is almost their own island. Oftentimes the site staff doesn't even, don't even get assigned their own email addresses. There's oftentimes language barriers, which we hear a ton about where people are hiring very technically capable folks who English may not be their first language. And there's always sort of constant discussion around, will they be a good part of this team?

not because they're not capable, but because they might not be able to communicate in the volume that we're talking about. So I think those were the things that we heard. And really the current tools out there are falling quite short to help solve this problem, which is really why we view this as such a great opportunity.

Nate Smoyer (11:08.694)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (11:26.54)
You kind of just, you already jumped ahead. You basically broke down all the feature sets of Synco here without me saying it, but obviously that makes sense.

Jason Griffith (11:36.556)
Well, mean, those were really the problems, I would say, that we identified.

Nate Smoyer (11:39.32)
problems and then what Syncios set out to solve for. So why don't we just jump right to that? Because I think that's the natural lead in here. So as I led with the intro, real -time messaging platform for product management teams. I think the context here is key and then real -time key pieces. So maybe we can break that down functionally for those listening. How does this actually work tactically for

the manager for the site staff and so

Jason Griffith (12:13.186)
Yeah. Well, I think it's sort of important to note that when we thought about building a product, we realized that the unfair advantage that we could have is that we would build this product specifically for property management. And if you look at the current tools that are out there in the market, email and Teams and WhatsApp,

We believe that the main root cause of the problem is that if you look at the property management tech stack and all the things that they use to optimize leasing and optimize inspections, et cetera, like every accounting, every one of those pieces of software are built for property management except for communication, right?

property management is still using the same software that the dental office is using, that the Department of Defense is using, and that the car wash is using. They're using Outlook too. There's no features that are specific for them. So we realized that in the world of property management, this is a hyper collaborative environment that does not lend itself well to things like Slack, which have been very popular with tech companies, where channels are kind of used for collaboration.

Why not? Because if you think about the way a channel is structured...

In the world of property management, we've seen some companies try to implement a slack. And the reason it doesn't work is because, you know, someone will create a channel for a building. And what they find is that, you know, the, let's say the, accounting team might go into that channel to say something about, you know, a payment or what have you, but then all of a they're flooded by messages about a dog barking till three o 'clock in the morning or a water leak or what have you. So they're kind of trapped in this channel.

Jason Griffith (14:00.376)
for the million things that could happen with the building and they just want to be a part of it. So what we realized is at a structural level, we actually had to kind of jailbreak the thread, right? We needed to take out just these conversations and say, we're going to have a topic -based conversation. And for this one conversation, let's say about a delinquency report, we need

the property management to be able to come together with, you know, let's say the maintenance team come together with the accounting team to talk about, here's what's happening with collections. This unit isn't paying because there's an issue in their unit. Like let's collaborate around this one thing. So what at a fundamental level, the way that we tackle this is we've sort of taken out conversations and making them topic based conversations.

Nate Smoyer (14:40.013)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (14:52.716)
We allow people to bring in groups of people or individuals. Groups could be brought in via, I could bring in a group for a building or a group for a function like marketing, what have you. And the first thing that we wanted to do was provide our clients with the ability to control what hits their inbox. So unlike email where either you're CC'd on something and you know about it or you're not and you don't, like it's either in or out of your inbox, right?

What we've done is give our clients the ability to differentiate on their own between the groups where they want to receive messages in their Cinco inbox, you know, it's an emergency, it's part of the executive team, what have you, versus those groups that they want to drop in on. So they don't have to send the, are we on that? Right? So for example, if you're the COO of a company, you might have a passing interest in where we are for the offsite.

right, that you're planning or the budget bootcamp, but you don't want to receive every little message about it. And so what Synco allows you to do is say, hey, for this topic of conversation, incident reports, every single thing needs to come into my inbox. But for this topic of conversation, the budget bootcamp, I want to be able to drop in on that and see what's going on and participate if I should so choose. So that was sort of a basic structural element. The second thing that we allowed people to do is

tag and organize all the conversations around the same way that they think about their business and the way their PMS is organized. So we allow people to say, this conversation is for the Skidmore unit 5B. And what that effectively means is that if you were to bring in a new property management for the Skidmore, they could go back in time and see the entire history of conversations for that building, down to that unit or a project or what have you. So we organize their world sort of the same.

the same way. And then we've built a whole bunch of other things that I think are very specific to the industry, everything from real time language translation, where folks can speak, type in their own language or record a message in their own language. And it literally gets translated in real time and you can read it in any language you want. And then of course, a big cornerstone of this is integration into the rest of the tech

Jason Griffith (17:13.07)
and being able to talk to all the other systems that you

Nate Smoyer (17:17.68)
I definitely want to dig into the language feature here, but I want to go back a little bit because earlier we talked about like, you don't have to change necessarily the, like for some of your staff, you know, let's say actually it's not a staff, maybe it's the HVAC contractor, right? They've got a contract to come out once a month, they service the units, make sure everything's good. Maybe they've got like a special upkeep every three to six months they have on the roof units, that sort of

Jason Griffith (17:20.942)
Great.

Jason Griffith (17:30.56)
Mhm.

Nate Smoyer (17:45.73)
So they don't need to know about barking dogs. They don't need to know necessarily about move in, move outs, right? It's just age back related stuff. they also, contractors, you know, they may not be like literally sitting at their desk, right? So like a lot of us are used to thinking about tech tools as like, okay, I'm sitting at my desk. I've got my laptop set up and all that. They may be moving about. And you kind of talked about earlier, like not having to change the flow of like what you're doing. So they're just working out of email.

Jason Griffith (18:14.508)
Yep. Yep.

Nate Smoyer (18:14.594)
The experience for them is nothing out of the ordinary. It's it's standard email, but it's still threading on, on your end. that's all that side is controlled by just whoever's like your, your Cinco admin. that probably the property manager is controlling those communications.

Jason Griffith (18:29.166)
Yeah, so I think that's it's worth digging into. You know, because a lot of times when we talk to folks and they hear about what we're doing, kind of their immediate reaction might be like, well, we we have Microsoft Teams, right? And then when you dig into that, what Microsoft Teams really means is like, that's just what I still have 300 emails. People are still texting. People are still using WhatsApp. It's just they also use Teams for video chat or messages here and there.

Nate Smoyer (18:56.416)
In addition to, yeah.

Jason Griffith (18:59.022)
We rarely see teams deployed out into the field. And quite frankly, like one of the basic limitations is so much of on the operational or maintenance side involves, like you said, the third party contractor, or if it's for a fee management company and it's not, it might involve your client, right? Can we have approval to do this work or what have you? So there's a lot in property management of third party connectivity that's required for if you're going to have one standard.

system. What we realized is there's just no way you're going to get your plumber to use Teams, right? They're just not going to do it, right? Or even your client, you can't change the way they fundamentally work. So we spent a lot of time thinking through this and effectively, as you said, the way it works is if you're on Synco, you might say, hey, I'm having this conversation. I need to bring in my contractor.

Nate Smoyer (19:41.922)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (19:54.752)
into this conversation. So you can literally just select their email address from, you know, from the O list, right? And they, the experience with the contractor is they will get an email. Looks like a normal email with the attachments, what have you. And they respond to it and their response comes back into Synco looking like they're part of the team. Of course, we make it clear that this is an external conversation, but.

Nate Smoyer (20:18.55)
Yeah, sure.

Jason Griffith (20:19.884)
We realized we actually had to go one level deeper because we sort of did that initially and the feedback that we got was, yeah, but when you're dealing with external parties, you probably don't want them to see the entirety of a conversation. You might just want to take a little piece of it and share that. So again, just deeper and deeper.

we built the type of tools where you could say, yeah, I actually just want to take this one comment and this one photo from this much broader conversation and bring in my plumber onto that one. The other cool thing that folks often do is when I went back, when going back to that concept of like, have these groups, someone could create a group on Cinco called the Baxter Lobby renovation. And part of that group might be an external contractor.

So for the Synco user, they might say, hey, I'm sending a message to the Baxter renovation group, but that would go to their internal team as well as the GC on the job or the HVAC guy in the job. We've really spent a lot of time trying to build a system that integrates the external parties as if they're team members, because in effect, oftentimes they are in this space.

Nate Smoyer (21:30.385)
Got it. And I think that's really interesting. mean, I've had the experience of trying to help launch Slack for a real estate team. And granted, this was a few years ago, but man, was there so much pushback. It was like, why can't we just use text? like, well, I saw the value of using Slack and our manager, you know, over the team saw the benefits of using

Jason Griffith (21:39.896)
Sorry to hear that. Yeah, yeah.

Nate Smoyer (21:58.21)
But there was a handful of agents who'd been in the business for a few years who were like, well, nothing's broken. I don't understand why we have to institute this. And really at the end of the day, was a matter of we were trying to improve communication across the team and also the effectiveness of going back to communications. Because that was one thing that, and I'm sure others in other businesses can feel this pain of like, sometimes it's not a matter of like in the moment. Sometimes you have to go back to, you have to go find the details, get back

Jason Griffith (22:14.466)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (22:26.444)
Hey, what was the origin of this or where are we trying to get to or what did we even land on the solution and how did we end up where we're

Jason Griffith (22:34.422)
I that's a great point. I I just, used to be a big Slack user at my last company. Like the whole company, like every tech company use Slack. And one of the curious things about Slack, and I found this for most people who use Slack is like in my personal life, I use Gmail and I use search all the time to try to find things that I need, but I never searched Slack. Why? Well, the reason I didn't, and I find a lot of people found it difficult is

Nate Smoyer (22:53.784)
constant.

Nate Smoyer (22:57.46)
interesting.

Jason Griffith (23:04.032)
If you're living in a world of channels, and like for example, I had an executive team channel and that channel went on for years, years, right? If I searched for something, it doesn't really produce relevant results. Cause it could be anything from, you know, if I choose, I don't know, fundraising, it could be everything from like our series A to like my VP's kids fundraiser and his kindergarten, right? It just did not, it would just find all these little snippets and it wouldn't do anything that was particularly helpful.

Nate Smoyer (23:11.146)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (23:34.296)
I think that the superpower here is can I pull out a conversation? Can I make the system understand that this is about a building and not only that, it's about a unit and then can I give access retroactively to new people who come in who are responsible?

Nate Smoyer (23:51.202)
Yeah, I wanna dig a little bit into the language feature and then we've got two other things I wanna get into, but maybe you can break down a little bit more. Why is this a feature that you really focused on? Because I think this might be the first time I'm hearing this and maybe other tools do some translations, but as far as real -time communication, I haven't heard of this in property management. So why focus on this? Why build this?

Jason Griffith (23:57.132)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (24:19.402)
you functionally, really, how does it work? You kind of gave an example, but I'd love to hear a little bit

Jason Griffith (24:24.364)
Yeah, well, like every feature that we've built, I can't claim credit that we just inspired, we thought of it. Everything that we have built has been our users saying like, this is great, but it would be amazing if X, right? And in this case, one of the early X's that we heard was like, we would sit with our clients and be like, show me how you're using this stuff. And they're like,

Look, this guy wrote in Spanish, you've got two people. He's like, look, what's cool is I see these two of my users or this group of my users discussing things amongst themselves, but they're discussing it in Spanish and I don't know what they're saying. Right. And they're literally like taking Google translate, copying it, pasting it. like, we could really put that same engine just right in the thing. and so, you know, what it started with

And we literally, Nate, have, it's amazing. We have people where like, I think I've had, so one scenario where you have a maintenance person speaking one language, I think it was Spanish. And then they were talking to a property manager who was typing in Albanian. And then they were talking to a property manager who was talking in Portuguese. And they all think that the other parties are, I mean, it looks like the other parties are speaking in their own native tongue. So it's really, really cool.

Nate Smoyer (25:44.28)
That's incredible.

Jason Griffith (25:48.416)
Actually, what's really neat is we just released voice notes where, I mean, we always had like push to speak and then it would do speech to text, but we just released a full on voice note. I want to, you know, kind of like WhatsApp, like I want to deliver a voice note, but in about another week or two, or by the time this airs, it'll be out for a while. basically have the voice note gets transcribed and then translated.

Nate Smoyer (26:05.388)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (26:16.768)
So again, it's just trying to make this as absolutely seamless and delightful for field staff to CEO, At boiler room to boardroom. That's what we're going for

Nate Smoyer (26:30.732)
Wow, very cool. Let's jump here to a topic that invariably always comes up with property management tools and that's the capability and ability to integrate. Where are you guys on building out for that and what's been your approach?

Jason Griffith (26:39.629)
Yeah.

Jason Griffith (26:45.154)
Yeah.

Yeah, so that isn't a really critical part of our strategy. As I mentioned, our CTO, John Bonds, was a systems integrator for all the major platforms out there. And we think that this is absolutely essential. So we're sort of taking two approaches to it. The first thing that we built, which has proven to be just

incredibly helpful is, the original feedback that we got from clients is, well, wouldn't it be, it would be really helpful because I'll get an external email. How do I get that email into SyncGo? Right. And that's just not something that's, that's easy to do on kind of like if you're using WhatsApp or text, like you copy paste, what have you. So we built this capability where you can literally forward an email into a, to a specific

email address and that depending on the email address would go to a person or a group on Cinco automatically. But what that actually unlocked was the ability to take all of the output from the other systems. You think about, know, someone has a heat timer system, someone has a notification system, a leasing system, all of the notifications that go out actually now come directly into Cinco without ever creating an email and outlook. It just comes directly into Cinco, tagged, sent to the

We have one client who was using an AI based security system, which for example, would know that no one should be in the gym after 11 o 'clock at night. And it would, you know, if it saw someone there would take a video and it would send an email. But of course the email would sort of go into an inbox that was buried in email, right? So now that video just goes directly to Cinco to the security team labeled as such, et cetera.

Jason Griffith (28:35.436)
So that was sort of our first baseline integration where our clients out of the box, no code can start bringing all the output from all the other systems into Synco. But we think the future really is a much deeper integration. So for example, we're neck deep working with property management software partners where, for example, someone could...

get notified of a new work order in Cinco and start having a conversation about it where the record is the link to that work order. Or we're having a conversation about an issue, exchanging photos, what have you. And instead of retyping that into your property management software with a one click, you're creating the work order in that software. Or just simply we're having a conversation about, you know, a resident and I want to take this conversation and this attachment and I want

attach it to the object in the property management software.

you know, people view their property management software as a critical system of record. And oftentimes, you know, in the current world, it's just like, I have my organized system of record, then I have craziness with my communication. And so our job is to make the communication be all in one system, organized the same way, and then allow those two systems to talk where necessary.

Nate Smoyer (29:47.65)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (29:58.092)
Got it. And of course, the other thing I wanted to get into, we can't ignore all year and especially anything that has to do with communications. I feel like this is almost now a mandatory, which is AI. The progression we're seeing with AI is quite tremendous. In fact, here's an example that my wife was sharing with me. She's a Salesforce admin.

builds out Salesforce, you know, systems and all that. And she said to Salesforce was waiting, was going to wait until later this year. I don't know if it was a dream force or one of their big conferences to debut AI technologies and they just released it. They're like, can't even wait. They're, they're actually like ahead of schedule. They're moving and realize the importance of shipping. These capabilities are so critical that they actually went and shipped it way ahead of their.

Jason Griffith (30:28.588)
cool.

Yeah.

Jason Griffith (30:44.332)
Yeah. Yeah. It's happening so fast.

Jason Griffith (30:55.446)
Yeah,

Nate Smoyer (30:56.278)
which I'm sure the marketing team was stoked on that. But I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about AI, how are you incorporating it and where does it go from here, whether both at Zinco but also broadly across the

Jason Griffith (31:11.266)
Look, I think this industry is so ripe for AI innovation. I think you're already seeing, I hesitate to call it low hanging fruit because it's so awesome when it works. it's just like when, you yeah, for sure. mean, but you know, see, see PMC is now using AI for everything from obviously.

Nate Smoyer (31:23.178)
If it's a good ripe fruit, should be hanging low.

Jason Griffith (31:34.222)
prospect engagement, makes a ton of sense answering questions about a unit, to collections, a ton of sense. And I think those things are like, yes, there it is. You go and you got to do it. And I think in our world of communication, it's a little bit more complicated. And you have to really take a couple of steps back in order to move forward. so problem one is when all your communication is on different systems, there is no AI that's going to effectively

Nate Smoyer (31:37.186)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Griffith (32:03.79)
help with that, right? And man, the number of times I've been in meetings where you have the CIO over here and the COO over here and the CIO is like, well, let me tell you about what Microsoft is doing with AI and COO. You know, I'll say like, well, how much of your company communication is on text and WhatsApp? And they're like, 40%. You know, it's really, it's sort of problem number one, right? So then you get everybody onto one system.

And then there's the question of how is your data structured and can AI do something with it? And what I would argue is let's just say for the sake of, you know, for the sake of thinking through this, like if you could get all PMCs to just use Outlook or Teams for a hundred percent of communication, right? It's never been done, but like, let's just say you could, right? Meaning there is no texting, there is no WhatsApp, it's only on email as an example.

and your 300 emails goes up to 600 emails. Whether it's 300, whether it's 600, feel pretty strongly if you were to take AI and say, summarize this inbox, it's not gonna give you anything that's really super helpful, right? Because those 300 emails are so varied. But with Synco, the way that we are architected at a fundamental level

When people are communicating, they're bringing in groups of people based on the topic that they're discussing, right? The normal motion for a regional property manager on Cinco is to come in and say, I wonder what's happening at the Hillcrest. I'm not getting every single, no, because I've chosen to be able to drop in on that topic. Well.

What we're building and already deployed is the ability to summarize conversations and then summarize groups of conversations based on the building. So to be able to say, I want to see a summary of what has happened in the last 48 hours at the Hillcrest. That's not something that Outlook could parse because it doesn't understand what the Hillcrest is in the context of 22 different emails, right? Here, where everything is driven by that group, right? You can suddenly get a great.

Jason Griffith (34:17.088)
summary. So I think the way that we're thinking about it is first, let's get the data into one system so we can structure it, so we can summarize it, which makes it a lot easier to deal with it get up to date. And then where I think the future is, is allowing property managers to A, do more with less. So helping them develop the responses to things that we see over and over that we've kind of learned because again, industry specific information, right? mean, there's, you

Nate Smoyer (34:43.302)
Mm

Jason Griffith (34:44.928)
only so many ways that you deal with emergencies and groups that you'd want to bring together and people you might want to reach out to. So I think there's that. And then, you know, I think it's trying to look at and understand trends in communications where, you know, you want to be able to say, hey, I see you're talking about this and you talked about this with this other person. Do you want to bring them into the conversation? Like those are the kind of really interesting things that I think make collaboration that much more effective.

Nate Smoyer (35:13.9)
Yeah. I tend to agree with your at large assessment, by the way. I do think the industry is ripe for innovation. I hesitate to use the word disruption and I appreciate your use of the word innovation. don't necessarily think that we're going to see total chaos or total change, but I think it will improve how we move about. It will improve the effectiveness of communications. We all stand to benefit, I think, quite a bit here.

Jason Griffith (35:20.952)
Mm.

Nate Smoyer (35:42.654)
I think especially in an industry where communication is key.

Jason Griffith (35:46.904)
Yeah, I think, you know, my, my sense of where we are right now is that there are so many solutions, good solutions out there on the market that property management firms are really quite thoughtful about. I want to bring in something that's going to have a rapid time to value. I'm not, I don't want to disrupt the whole, you know, I don't want to throw everything out and rethink everything. I need to do something where.

Nate Smoyer (36:04.95)
Mmm.

Jason Griffith (36:12.6)
the level of change management is minimized, it feels like it's an evolution and not a revolution. I think that that's the trend. And so, that's certainly how we're trying to build our system with kind of rapid time to value and at the most junior levels in the organization, like giving them tools that feel exceedingly familiar, right? I mean, if I can give a tool to a...

maintenance person that says like, literally feels just like WhatsApp or text. It's just, you can speak in your own language. Like, you know, every day we're just trying to get closer and closer to that experience.

Nate Smoyer (36:51.192)
Yeah. Jason, we're going to shift here and jump down to the bottom of the show segment. I like to call for the future for the futures. When I get to ask each guest who comes on a show to give their best predictions based on the following four questions. You ready to

Jason Griffith (36:58.445)
Okay.

Jason Griffith (37:03.532)
Okay, I'm ready to play.

Nate Smoyer (37:05.976)
All right, number one here, nice and easy. What does Synco look like one year from

Jason Griffith (37:12.502)
Yeah, I think my hope for Cinco one year from now is that you're just going to start hearing about it more and more often as a result of the kind of industry led innovations that we are.

building. I would say right now we're probably focused on the mid -market quite a bit, but you my hope is a year from now we can start reaching higher up into the tree based on conversations that we're already having now because I think that this is a universal problem from the smallest mom and pops to the most monster PMCs out there.

Nate Smoyer (37:45.784)
Yeah. Number two, how do you, say top as in like best performing. How do you top property managers describe team communications in the year 2027?

Jason Griffith (38:01.677)
That's a really good question. I would say fluid, delightful, collaborative, and easy.

Nate Smoyer (38:14.786)
word delightful, right to my heart, man. That's surprise and delight. It's just at the top of my list. I've actually been listening to, or just concluded listening to the Gary Vaynerchuk newest book. And he uses that phrase a lot as well, surprise and delight. just underrated in my opinion of a thing to

Jason Griffith (38:19.096)
Wouldn't that be great? Yeah.

Jason Griffith (38:28.498)
yeah.

Yeah.

Jason Griffith (38:36.558)
And something you, certainly in 2024, I've never heard anyone describe current communications as delightful. So it's a good 2027 goal. Yeah, exactly.

Nate Smoyer (38:42.84)
That's a great target. There we go. All right, number three here on For the Future. What's one industry trend you think will continue, but you wish would go

Jason Griffith (39:00.792)
That is a really good one. One industry trend that I think will continue that I wish would go away.

Well, I would say this, I can't directly answer your question, but I'll give you kind of what came to mind. I think centralization is a really interesting thing and we hear such different takes on it all the time where I think for some people, for some companies, it has been quite transformative, but quite disruptive.

Nate Smoyer (39:21.164)
Shoo.

Jason Griffith (39:41.578)
Others, they've put a lot of time and energy into it, but they feel that it's quite, but maybe the results have not lived up to what their hopes and dreams are. And others, it's just been a kind of start and stop, know, fits and starts without getting legs. We keep a very close eye on this because fundamentally we believe how can you possibly centralize functions?

without centralizing communications. And so look, I think whether a company is centralizing or not, I think we're helpful and effective. We haven't seen this kind of runaway success of centralization where everybody's doing it, it's delightful for everybody and it's a success for everybody. But we do think that if it does become central and broad -based that we can really help make it, unlock its full potential.

So not a great, not a great, I wish it would go away. I don't, I'm sort of, think the jury's still kind of out for a lot of other reasons besides communication, but I think if it does become central, we're ready to

Nate Smoyer (40:46.583)
Mm

Nate Smoyer (40:51.36)
All right, last one here on For the Future. What's one thing you believe will dramatically change or fade away in real estate as a result of tech advances?

Jason Griffith (41:01.262)
Mm. Yeah. My hope is that, and I'd like to be very much part of it, if we could banish the CC and not result in people having... Really? You're the one? I mean, God. The things that I have seen... Yeah, I've seen bosses hand out one -page memos

Nate Smoyer (41:15.83)
No, I love the CC. I'm the guy. No, keep going, keep going.

Jason Griffith (41:30.506)
explaining to people when they should be CC'd. When they should be CC'd, right? Like, yes this, but not this, but yes this, but not this, and look who always gets it wrong, right? Like, it just seems like in the world of all the information in the cloud, having AI, having good search, it seems like you should be able to get rid of this. that, that is so core to our mission. I want to live in a world where no one ever has to think, who should I CC?

It's an ambitious goal, but I want to get us

Nate Smoyer (42:02.456)
This is one of those things, just because I have some thoughts on CCs, this is so bizarre that I actually feel like I have very foreign thoughts on this. But a lot of stems from one of my experiences at a software company years ago, the CEO, every once in a while he would send out memos to the whole company. And it was one of those things of how we created a unified culture around communication. And this is one of those things he would talk about on regular basis.

Jason Griffith (42:11.568)
Tell me.

Nate Smoyer (42:30.996)
And it wasn't because he liked, like the harp on it's like the afternoon, please. Every once in a while, good reminders is like, if you're a stakeholder, if you're in the know, but there's no action required CC. And that was basically the rule. The other rule I really did appreciate from him though, was don't send me an email. Got it. Don't respond back. Thank you. Like I know the communication reached you. It's email. It doesn't just go into some foreign land.

Jason Griffith (42:56.098)
Well, so can I ask you a question about that? Because so the two things that I just heard you say, which are interesting is one highly formal rules around CC, right? So people know like only send to CC if there is no action required only do that. Right. So there are rules. that's that's a interesting, I said, so it's sort of depending on the nature of a business, like you can enforce that. But number, you know, number two is like the don't send me the, you know, got

Nate Smoyer (43:07.884)
There were rules. Yes. Yep.

Jason Griffith (43:26.062)
Well, the problem in our industry is when the average employee has 300 emails, oftentimes, I was talking to a CEO who had about 50 ,000 units, right? And he told me, and by the way, I've heard this story many times, that the internal email open rate at his firm was 50%. Meaning for 50 % of the time, the recipient would say, I see who sent it.

Nate Smoyer (43:48.465)
no.

Jason Griffith (43:56.334)
I see the title. I just don't have time to open it and read it. I just don't have the hours in the day. I've got 400 other emails coming in, right? And again, I really do believe that that's unique to our industry and the volume. So if I was in a, you know, I get 30 email a day volume, like I get it. It's pretty assured I'm going to read it, but like, man, in our industry.

Nate Smoyer (44:01.378)
Wow.

Jason Griffith (44:17.41)
Yeah, there was a great Swift Bunny report that talked about the frustrations that property managers have, which is like, I send an email, I'm waiting for a response, I can't service my residents because I don't know if they got it, I don't know if I'm getting it back. So that just seems so pervasive where if you can't say, hey, I got this and I'm working on it, I think it's a real problem.

Nate Smoyer (44:29.029)
Mmm.

Jason Griffith (44:43.826)
I'll tell you one other interesting thing. And this is not a product that we have today, but like most great products, like, you know, there's a germ of something here. I hear a lot of feedback about task management amongst teams. And I'm not talking about a work order, right? Like clearly we have a pretty well -defined process for that in our industry. Something needs to be fixed. gets fixed. They do a work order. I'm talking about the day to day like, hey, Nate.

Could you just work on that thing that we talked about and get it done by next Tuesday? Great. Now what happens today? And this happens in every conversation. I'm gonna, usually I'm gonna like put a, literally a appointment in my calendar next Tuesday, check in with Nate, make sure that he's done this thing and like, man, that's responsible for a lot of email volume all over the board. So I think that there is

potential future capability around Synco where we can handle those kind of tasks that get lightly developed amongst communication of team members to take away the need to be like, got it, I'm working on it, where are we on this? So there's something there, but one step at a time. think we have a big low hanging fruit right in front of it and we're gonna go at that hard.

Nate Smoyer (46:03.244)
Jason, this was a lot of fun. Appreciate the conversation. Obviously, communications big in any business, but very particular to property management. And it's exciting here what you guys are working on. Before we close out the show, for those who want to get in touch with you and or learn more about Cinco, where do they go and how do they do

Jason Griffith (46:07.342)
It was great.

Jason Griffith (46:22.254)
TeamSynco .com and it's T -E -A -S -Y -N -C -O

Nate Smoyer (46:27.778)
Boom, there it is everyone. As always, I appreciate you on the show. Until next time, we'll see you later.

Jason Griffith (46:35.49)
Thanks, Nate.

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