Compical (415) 489-0762

For residential property management companies

Work orders come in all day. Someone routes every one.

Requests come in by portal, phone, text, and email, and somebody has to work out the unit, the problem, the access, and who to send. Half come back for missing details. Somebody will sell you a system that promises to sort that out. Call me before you buy it and I will tell you what it does and what your current software already does.

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Where I would start

The job I would look at first.

This is a guess based on businesses like yours, not a diagnosis of yours. On the call we find out whether it is actually your problem.

The job

Turning a maintenance request into a work order you can send somebody on

Where it usually goes wrong

Requests come in by portal, phone, text and email, and half of them are missing something. Which unit. How to get in. What is actually broken. Somebody has to go back and ask, then sort out whether it is the same request that came in yesterday by a different route, before anyone can be sent.

What I would ask on the phone

On the phone I ask how work comes in, what happens to the odd ones, and what your property software, resident portal and work-order system already do that nobody turned on. I do not assume you need anything built, and I have no reason to want you to.

What stays with your people

Your people decide how urgent a job is, who gets sent, and what happens in an emergency. Anything to do with a resident, a lease, a notice, getting into somebody's home, or what the law requires stays with your property managers. Nothing goes to a resident until one of your people has read it and put their name on it.

When a call is worth it

You get the most out of thirty minutes when a few things are true.

  • The same work-order job runs all day across a portfolio or several teams, so even a small fix is worth real money to you.
  • You can tell me roughly what the mess costs: entry done twice, calls back, work-order corrections, after-hours callouts, jobs sitting. Rough is fine, I am not auditing you.
  • You can get whoever runs maintenance on the phone at some point, because they know things you do not.
  • You are open to the answer being that you already own the fix and somebody needs to turn it on. That is the answer more often than not.

What to call about

Four things worth picking up the phone for.

A question you need answered

Should I be using AI for this. My competitor says he automated his intake, is that real. My office manager wants a new system, do we actually need one. Or nobody is selling you anything at all and you read something about AI and want to know what it comes to for a business like yours. You ask, I answer. Some of these take five minutes.

A contract you are about to sign

Send me the proposal, the contract, the statement of work. I read it and tell you on the phone what it actually commits you to, what is missing from it, and which parts you are already paying for somewhere else.

Getting your people using the AI tools

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever one. I sit with the people who do the work and show them what it is genuinely good at for their job and what it will get wrong. Often that is the cheaper answer than buying anything, because you are probably already paying for one of these and nobody is using it.

A vendor call you want me on

I join the demo with you and ask the things you do not know to ask. Booked in advance rather than on the spot, because I need to read up first.

Who should be on the call

Have whoever runs maintenance on the call if you can.

President, or whoever runs operations

Own the decision, agree where the job starts and stops, and decide whether what I find is worth acting on.

Your property managers and whoever runs maintenance

They say what a work order needs on it before anybody is sent, what happens to the odd ones, what the emergency procedure is, and where a person has to take over. They know things you do not.

Whoever handles the money and the software, plus your attorney if one is involved

At a company this size the first part is usually one person. Check my cost numbers, what you are already paying for, who can get at resident records, what your vendors will allow, and what a fix would depend on.

Limits

Resident, safety, and housing decisions stay with people.

I tell you what the software will and will not do. Every professional, legal and safety call stays with you and your own advisers.

No applicant or resident decisions

It does not screen, score, rank, approve or turn down an applicant, set terms for one resident and not another, decide an accommodation request, or recommend anything that goes against a resident.

People handle emergencies and dispatch

Your people decide what is urgent, follow the emergency procedure, choose the response, say who gets access to a unit, and make every safety call.

Resident communication requires review

One named employee checks the property, the unit, the facts, the timing, how you are getting in, who is paying, and what you have just promised, before anything is sent.

Resident records stay controlled

Anything I try gets tried on made-up records, not your residents. If we ever need your real ones, it happens somewhere you control, and you decide up front who can see them and how long they are kept.

Not a fit

When a phone call is not what you need.

  • Anything that decides something about a person: screening a tenant, setting rent or a deposit, ruling on an accommodation, enforcing a lease, or scoring a resident.
  • You want the machine deciding what is an emergency, who gets sent, who gets into a unit, what notice goes out, or what gets said to a resident, with nobody checking. That is not something I will help you build.
  • You want everything moved to new property software, all your data cleaned up, a tenant-screening product built, or a resident app built.
  • Nobody can make the call, nobody owns the job day to day, or I cannot get at your numbers and the people who run it.
  • You want somebody to run the project and deal with the vendor for you. I will do a specific job you point me at, quoted in hours with a number it will not go past before I start. I will not run the project or manage your vendor.

Reference material

Where the limits above come from

These are the industry and government rules the limits above follow. I will walk you through any of it on the phone. What you actually have to do depends on your work, your state, your customers, your contracts, and your own advisers.

What I put at risk

Three things I will put in writing.

Compical is new and I am taking my first clients now. I would rather say that than have you work it out. I cannot point you at one company like yours that I have already done this for, never mind ten. What I can do instead is put something of mine at risk on every single call, which is what the three commitments below are.

Nobody pays me except you

No referral fees, no reseller margin, no commission from a vendor. Nobody pays me to point you at their product. If the answer is that you already own the fix and somebody needs to turn it on, that is the answer you get, and the call ends there.

If it was not worth it, I will not bill you

You hang up, you decide the call was not worth what I charge, you tell me. I do not send the invoice, and you do not have to argue about it. That is on every call, not once at the start. It is about calls. Work you have asked me to build is quoted and paid for before I start it, and that is a different arrangement.

If I read your contract wrong, I fix it on my time

If I tell you a contract is clean and you find out later that it commits you to something I missed, call me. I get on the phone with you and with the vendor as many times as it takes to sort it out, and none of that time is billed. That is not a refund of the call. That is me working the problem I caused.

Start here

Who do you call about this stuff?

The first call is free and takes thirty minutes. I use it to learn what you run and who does what, so the paid calls are short. I am not selling you anything on it, because there is nothing to sell you yet.

Already bought one and it is not doing what he said it would? That is a call too.

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