Introducing: Managing Common Grounds | Pilot Episode
Download MP3Welcome to Managing Common Grounds, the HOA podcast, where we'll share quick tips, industry insights, and more to help automate and elevate your community management practices produced by Stan AI. So let's Jacob
Anthony Ivanovsky:here and myself, your host. I'm from Jacob here and myself, your host. I'm from our operations team here at Stan AI. A little bit about me. I help some of the main players in the HOA space get set up with the best in class suite of AI tools, a part of Stan.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And a little bit about Jacob here.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. I'm part of the business development team, and essentially, I get to play around with AI and help community association managers, HOA companies, property management companies install that AI into their communities to handle homeowner inquiries, automate workflows, and do so much more. We could actually talk about it for an hour, but we won't on this call. Awesome.
Anthony Ivanovsky:Sweet. Well, if you are a community or property manager and you manage common ground for a living, we are here for you. This is the podcast for you. We're hoping to bring all of that industry insights from conversations in the space, thought leadership, the painstaking process of introducing technology into the community management area. We're hoping to bring all of that wisdom that we've learned thus far in over 2 a half 1000000 homeowners interacting with Stan across 15,000 plus community associations to share that wisdom with all of you here and bring the future of technology to the CAM space.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. We get insights every day. We're constantly talking to our customers, potential customers, all in that industry. So we're gonna bring those to you. We're gonna bring those funny stories as well that we hear in the industry.
Jacob Letourneau:And anything that you may have questions about, please let us know so that we can bring it to your attention.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And a little bit about StandAI for those of you that might be you. And, obviously, Jacob and I work here, and this is the tool and platform that we're bringing to the market each and every day. But a little bit about our story as well, we were founded by 2 community and property managers who spent upwards of decades in the space and said there's got to be a better way of communicating with owners and residents than sitting behind an inbox behind the desk and running through it all the time. And even beyond that, there has to be more automation and technology for a space that is filled with manual labor. And that could be something as simple as manually opening up a check to typing up an email or sending a letter back to a homeowner.
Anthony Ivanovsky:This is a space that is in dire and desperate need of tech and automation, and that's where Stan comes in.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. And I think the other thing that people forget is with AI nowadays, everyone's scared a bit. It's almost like there's this fence. Right? And I think, Anthony, you've seen this where it's either you're a total enthusiast with AI or you're totally against it.
Jacob Letourneau:You won't ever touch it. You're scared it's gonna take your job, your partner, your money, whatever it is. Right? So we're also here to just come in and just talk about what AI is, how it can help you in your normal day to day. You don't have to be a wizard with it.
Jacob Letourneau:That's our job, actually. So we can come in and really help you that way. And it's really cool to see the use cases that people will start using AI with. For example, I just had a call with a client, and we were helping him fix a leaky toilet with AI just to to show you the kind of functionality there.
Anthony Ivanovsky:Wow. An AI plumber and maintenance expert. That honestly just sounds like the future. And you bring up a really great point around this being a tool to really drive, impact, and push forward an industry rather than replace. And that's where we truly see Stand AI as a fit in being the first tool to offer autonomous process and workflow automation versus, as I was saying before, having to sit behind that desk and dread all of the different task lists that you have.
Anthony Ivanovsky:Introducing AI, whether it's Stan or through other products in the space, to be able to bring peace of mind and automation to that is where we aim to be. And it could be something like automating how to fix a leak in a toilet to managing a two way conversation with a vendor, putting together a scope of work, getting someone out there, collecting the fees for that. There's so many different moving parts that happen to that. And our goal is to really be the oil in that big machine that keeps all those parts moving.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. And the goal of this podcast is to bring those moving parts to visibility so that everyone knows about it. Right? Maybe you're new to this space. Maybe you just became a community association manager, and you have no idea where to start.
Jacob Letourneau:Well, we can be that AI hand for you, really steer that conversation and be those experts that you might need to come in to to help you. So we're we're excited to do that as well, and, yeah, just excited to do more of these podcasts to be able to give more insight into what's going on.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And a lot of that, as Jacob was saying, is is gonna come from delivering these solutions to the industry and all of the conversations that we've had with thought leaders in the space from boots on the ground at local trade shows to actually spending a number of hours with management companies and understanding their unique technology needs and introducing AI as a service to automate some of their toughest workflow challenges. But even beyond that, just looking at the day in a life is we feel we've truly understood what it is to be a community manager in a way, even though we're not personally responsible for properties or managing common grounds per se, but we've really lived vicariously through our customers and in that have felt that same unique pain and the challenges and also the unique things. There are folks that have been in this space far beyond, you know, the average tenure for any other role in any other industry to those that are just looking to get introduced and are hoping to find new ways to exceed and excel. Yeah.
Jacob Letourneau:A 100%. And a little personal tidbit here from Anthony and I. We're both landlords on top of our normal day jobs here at Sten AI. We have that kind of aspect to our lives where we're managing properties. We're dealing with tenants.
Jacob Letourneau:So we feel the pain, but also see the enjoyment of managing a property properly and having a a really nice interaction with a homeowner or a tenant. Right? So we bring that we'll bring that into this podcast as well. Some little insights there.
Anthony Ivanovsky:It's a people to people business. It's a people first industry a lot of the times. And even though we're automating things behind the scene, we'll take you on a tour of that human aspect. And I think there's two important things here is just the backgrounds of people in the space. We meet folks who are managing HOA's, who are airline pilots, to drummers, to DJs, to you name it.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And they're they're us. They're people. And it's weird because you might look at the HOA space in the industry and come across a Reddit post or complaints from owners or just attacks on the HOA manager, and they often lose that human aspect. And we're hoping to share and shed some light on a lot of that and then show how AI and technology through Stan are helping combat that and creating a better, more human like name for the day in the life and the HOA manager. So we're excited to bring that part of it.
Anthony Ivanovsky:But, yes, as property owners ourselves, we've definitely felt, you know, small scale similarities to to what you folks go through on a day to day.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. A 100%. And, like, just to to reiterate that point, really excited to bring that in the day in the life, in that aspect of a win win situation of how you can still go about your operations, still do your job properly, and have AI in the back as a superpower, kinda just supercharging everything else that you're doing. So we'll bring those stories as well, show you what some management companies are doing on top of what you might be doing so that you can start thinking of ideas to improve your community. And at the end of the day, that's what everyone wants is a happy community that is constantly revolving in terms of happy people, happy customers, happy board members.
Jacob Letourneau:So we'll talk about all that in these podcasts coming up as well.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And for some, it might sound like a dream, but we're gonna make it a reality and bring you the industry insight to make it that way. And just so a couple of things for our listeners to notice, we're hoping to give you access to Managing Common Rounds at least once a month. And like I said, we're actively working in bringing this technology to the future of HOA management and working across a number of associations each day to learn as much as possible about technology and find new creative ways to introduce that and be the ones who set the bar truly on this AI revolution. So we're hoping to bring this about once a month. We'll do our best to share those tips.
Anthony Ivanovsky:But you might hear from us more frequently as things in the industry change. AI is moving fast. There might be something new tomorrow. That's now the next wave that Jacob and I will be here to talk about. And I know, personally, Jacob is in every AI tool and a part of innovation and our product side as well, not just selling the platform and getting it in into the management companies, but a part of keeping it really unique and fresh and and bringing new creative capabilities to stand.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. That's gonna be awesome. Anthony, can we give them a little sneak peek and maybe kind of peek the curtain behind and see what we have coming out of Stant AI in the future? And then we'll maybe lead it into the next episode.
Anthony Ivanovsky:Yeah. What a great segue to to transition this. And I'll start by giving you the 50 foot view of Stant AI, where we're headed and what our vision is for the future and how that impacts the everyday community manager. And to start, Stant AI is the world's first community management AI assistance and workflow automation platforms. I know that's a mouthful, but let me break that down.
Anthony Ivanovsky:We want to handle 2 main core things a part of community management day to day, and that is speaking to your resident communities and managing the back and forth communications that come up from emails to phone calls, text messages, web chats, you name it. Wherever they're talking to you, we will be the answer to that. And then the second piece of that is removing the current autonomy challenges that come in place through the amounts of manual labor, whether that's having to write out meeting minutes to going through budget seasons right now, doing all of that on your own, our goal is to bring true workflow improvements there through Stan's engine and suite of solutions that can help automate a lot of that. So over the next few episodes, you'll be hearing from folks that have introduced this automation already into their community management workflows, the impacts to that, and how Stan has been a part of that revolution. And then to end here too, our main goal is for this role to shift from being constantly in everything and working in the business to working on your business, focusing on the growth of your management firm, acquisition of new business, putting the resident at the forefront of the experience, versus having to work in it all the time, answering questions, being inundated.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And we see the future of community management. For instance, being in New York and having a head office out there to remotely managing an entire association out in Texas, for instance, and understanding all the rules at regs, not having a boots on the ground community manager there, but having virtually running all of it. So if that excites you or scares you, feel free to tune in. We're very excited to take you on this journey, Jacob and I, and everyone else, of course, that is looking to join. And then also plug it back to Jacob to talk about some of the guest flows.
Anthony Ivanovsky:And if you're interested in joining on or have a specific topic that you'd like to share with us, we'll leave at that.
Jacob Letourneau:Yeah. So thanks, Anthony. That was a great kind of 50 foot overview to to shrink down. In terms of guests, we're gonna be bringing on some community association managers that are currently using Stan, some that are thinking about using Stan. Then we're gonna bring on some HOA companies as well as some presidents, some VPs, see how they're looking at AI in the industry, what they think, where it's going, where it's headed.
Jacob Letourneau:We'll give some feedback there as well. And then we're gonna do some workflows. So we'll actually get into how do you stand, how you can, as a community manager, for example, reply to a angry email from a homeowner without having to lift a finger, or how you can sit back and let Stan handle phone calls for you while you sit back and and drink margaritas on the beach or whatever you wanna do as a community association manager. But we'll bring those to you as we we come out with these episodes. So once again, if you have any questions that you'd like to see us talk about, any topics in terms of AI in the HOA space, property management space, come to us.
Jacob Letourneau:Let us know. You can always send us an email, jacob@stanai, anthony@stanai, or come and find us on LinkedIn. We're pretty active on there as
Anthony Ivanovsky:well. Awesome. Sounds like a plan. Well, we're looking forward to it and looking forward to hearing from all of you. Make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss a upcoming episode here.
Anthony Ivanovsky:Like I said, we'll be hoping to bring those to you by the end of every month moving forward. But you may hear from us more often, depending on trends in the space. And feel free to get subscribed to Managing Common Grounds on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, Iheartradio, just about anywhere that you get your podcasts. Listen to us, and we look forward to catching you on the next one. Speak soon.
Anthony Ivanovsky:See you.
