Before root.co, I spent five years as a virtual assistant and operations specialist inside property management firms. Residential portfolios. Commercial portfolios. AppFolio, Buildium, Rentec Direct, Propertyware. Tenant comms, lease renewals, work orders, owner statements, vendor follow-ups, month-end close. The stuff that has to happen on Tuesday whether you feel like it or not.
At some point I stopped just doing the work and started fixing it. Spotting where the same task got done four times by four people. Building SOPs that actually got followed. Writing the automation that quietly retires a recurring email thread. A few of those workflows are still running at companies I left two years ago.
Most clients hire me for one of these four. A handful keep me on for all four, which is when things really start to settle. Pick what matches your mess.
Day-to-day back office for property managers and brokerages. Tenant comms, lease tracking, work orders, owner statements, vendor coordination, month-end close. I work US hours when you need me to.
Migration, configuration, data cleanup. If your AppFolio is half-onboarded, your owner contacts haven’t been audited since 2022, or you’re moving from spreadsheets to a real platform — that’s the project.
I sit with your team for a week, find the four things eating their Tuesdays, and build the SOPs and automations that retire them. Owner reporting, renewal pipelines, vendor follow-ups, late-rent flows.
When you’re hiring root.co’s engineers to build you a dashboard or platform, I’m the one who keeps it grounded in how your business actually runs. I scope, I translate, I run the rollout.
Each one is a brief I wrote, a system I built out, and the kind of outcomes that flow from doing the unglamorous work properly. The fictional clients are stand-ins for the kinds of operations I’ve actually run inside real PM firms for the last five years.
Brief I wrote. A 27-year-old residential brokerage on the Upper West Side. Sweet team, real reputation. AppFolio hasn’t been audited in two years, owners are emailing brokers every month asking for last month’s statement, vendor follow-ups live on someone’s iPhone. I built this scenario to show how I’d unwind that kind of operational drift.
Rebuild the chart of accounts in AppFolio. Put each owner into the portal so they pull their own monthly statement. Write the vendor onboarding SOP that nobody had ever written down. Send the brokers one digest email on Monday morning instead of three follow-up texts a day. The marketing site at the link below is the front door for the scenario; the work behind it is where the hours go.
AppFolio audit, owner portal workflow, monthly statement automation, vendor playbook.
Two years of duplicate owner contacts, 47 ghost units, an unreconciled trust account. I worked through all of it in week two so we could launch on a clean book.
Brief I wrote. Small-batch roastery, roasts Mondays, ships by Friday. Subscriptions live in one spreadsheet, wholesale invoices in another, batch yields in a notebook. The co-founder is at the cafe until midnight twice a week reconciling them. Built this to show how the same operations thinking applies outside property management.
Subscriptions in Recharge. Wholesale in Shopify. Batch yields in a small back-office tool. All three talk to each other and roll up to one Sunday-night screen that tells the owner exactly what to roast Monday. A Sunday-night dashboard is a boring fix, and it’s the kind of fix that gives someone their week back.
Subscription engine, batch tracking, wholesale net-30, weekly roast schedule, the Sunday-night dashboard.
Migrate hundreds of subscribers off a Google Form to Recharge without losing one. Call the high-LTV ones personally. Treat the migration like a tenant move-in, not a database import.
Brief I wrote. A dental group opens a sixth Austin location and realises the six clinics have drifted into six different businesses. Different supply vendors. Different cancellation policies. Different ways of handling insurance. I built this to show how I’d write the shared playbook and get the front desks operating from the same script — without flattening the autonomy that makes each clinic work.
Write the shared SOPs (intake, cancellation, insurance, escalation). Set up centralised billing reconciliation across all six clinics in Curve Dental, rolling up to HQ every Friday. Consolidate supply ordering through two preferred vendors. Train the six front-desk leads over four mornings. The goal is one experience for the patient, six teams that still own their work.
Front-desk playbook, billing reconciliation, supply consolidation, training rollout across all six.
Spend two days at each clinic just watching the front desk work. Half the SOP writes itself from that. The other half has to be argued for over the next week, clinic by clinic.
Brief I wrote. Three partners at a private lending firm. One shared Excel file. Four hours every Monday reconciling Mortgage Automator, the bank feed, and three brokers’ inboxes. Built this scenario to show how I’d work alongside our engineers on an internal tool: spec it from the way the partners actually want to look at the book, then build the operating cadence around it.
Sit in on three Monday meetings before writing a single requirement. Map how the partners actually want to look at the book, write that into the dashboard spec. Then build the routine around it: broker submission template, weekly partner review checklist, auto-generated LP packet, covenant alert sweep on Thursdays.
Spec, weekly review flow, broker intake, LP packet automation, covenant alerts.
Sit in on three Monday meetings before writing a single requirement. The dashboard gets scoped on the partner’s napkin in week two, not by a feature list.
Brief I wrote. A property manager with 184 multifamily units across three states, patching together Buildium, Yardi, a CRM, maintenance in Trello, leasing in DocuSign, and a stack of Sheets to make it reconcile. The scenario is the biggest in the portfolio because it’s the closest to where I want to spend my time: helping a PM firm replace eight legacy tools with one operating system, and being the person who makes sure the engineering doesn’t outrun the operations.
From week one I’d sit with the leasing team, map the work-order taxonomy, and write the data-migration plan before anyone wrote a line of code. Then run the 90-day rollout: daily slack presence, week one on every standup, every clinic-meets-IT moment chaperoned. The platform is what the engineers ship. The rollout is the job.
Operating spec, migration plan, leasing & maintenance taxonomy, training, first 90 days of go-live support.
Three weeks of reconciliation work before go-live. The kind of audit that always finds mis-applied tenant payments. That’s the reason the migration doesn’t break the books on day one.
I don’t scope from a brief. I scope from sitting next to your team for a week, watching where the work actually breaks. Then we agree on the fix in writing, with a fixed fee and a calendar. After that I do the work.
One 60-minute call. I ask blunt questions about how Tuesdays go. If we’re a fit, you give me read-only access to AppFolio / Buildium / your tools so I can do real homework before week one.
I sit with your team (in person or on shadow calls) for a full week. Watch the inbox. Watch the front desk. Watch month-end close. Almost nobody does this and it’s the reason most consultants get it wrong.
Before I build anything new, I clean up what’s broken. Duplicate contacts. Ghost units. Stale vendor records. Unreconciled trust ledgers. Boring work, week-shaped, billed flat.
Write the workflows down. Build the automations. Train the people who will use them. Test on real Tuesdays, not in a sandbox. If something doesn’t land, we fix it this week, not next quarter.
You own every doc, every workflow, every account I touched. Some clients say thank you and run with it. Some keep me on as a fractional ops person, 10–20 hours a week. Either is fine.
One is hourly for ongoing back-office work. One is a fixed project fee for cleanup and setup. One is a monthly retainer if you want me embedded with your team. Every quote is in writing before you sign.
Send me a paragraph. What’s broken, how many units / clinics / clients you run, what platform you’re on. I’ll write back within a working day with whether I can help and what it would look like.