Kyle Shipp Career Background
What is your biggest career achievement?
- Bringing several new programs to market at RPM that enhance our renter's journey and increase lead-to-lease ratios, which has generated revenue of seven figures. Programs include custom web development, content creation, and social media organic posting packages, along with building out other notable tools that improve overall campaign performance and efficiency and reduces costs:
Developed dynamic and personalized email drip campaigns to create custom customer journeys for prospects
Built a custom spend optimization tool that reduces cost and saves teams 30-minute per campaign when building out a new campaign
Wrote and launched proprietary algorithms to predict and better allocate daily spending to provide strong performance for our ads and keep spending within budget, something rarely seen in the multifamily industry
Rolled out ad sequencing, which is unique to the industry and allows us the ability to serve our ads in a set sequence to enhance the customer journey
Building out and growing RPM’s digital marketing department to a team of 10 in less than two years (projected team of 21 before Q3 2023). A fully in-house team dedicated solely to digital marketing is extremely rare among multifamily companies as most outsource to third-party agencies.
Transitioning all digital marketing in-house to better support our clients and operators after seeing a large opportunity for RPM to have more insight and better capabilities to improve overall performance with campaigns living in-house rather than with external agencies. When piloting properties on our in-house service, all in-house digital campaigns out-performed our agencies' digital marketing campaigns, key performance indicators (KPIs) and onsite leasing velocity. Pilot properties on our in-house service experienced 157% more clicks on digital ads, 164% more conversions, and 71% decrease in cost per lead.
Earned 2021 Corporate Rookie of the Year Award during my first year of employment with RPM.
Given your past experiences, what event/ project or moment would you revisit and how would you go about it differently based on your current frame of mind?
- I have had the pleasure of being a manager since I was 22. I was young and inexperienced and didn’t know how to manage people. My management style has since progressed, and while I am still a work in progress I can look back and celebrate the change I have made. As I think back and reflect on what I would change, I notice three phases of how I previously managed that I have since shifted my perspective and created an amazing and highly collaborative team.
1: Fear of Failure
I was scared to try anything out of the norm. I was convinced people who progress in life are the ones who come into work and do the work in front of them and don’t think outside of the box. I told my teams in meetings to “stay in their lanes” and not to make too many waves. Now, I can’t think of a worse way to inspire a team to produce their best work. I realized “it might not work” is a terrible reason to not try, and if we want to grow as people and help the company grow, I needed to effectively communicate that what got us here won’t take us to where we want to go. We needed to shift our thinking and I needed to inspire the team to think fearlessly.
2 Bad leaders create no leaders
I thought the best way for me to stand out was to gate-keep everything. I was scared of being fired and thought the best way to keep my job was to not tell anyone what I do so no one could come in after me and be successful. I have heard the phrase “great leaders create leaders” but I had never thought of the inverse of that phrase. It took that shift in perspective for me to realize I wasn’t being a mediocre leader; I was being a bad leader if I create no leaders. I realized if I want to be a great leader, I needed to create strategic leaders and brilliant marketers. I needed to bring them along with me in the strategic planning process. Strategy is practice. Like all things in life, it takes time, effort, and repetition. I was keeping these reps to myself and not letting my team get the practice they needed to be great. I now realize strategy is for everyone.
3 Listen to your team because there’s a better way to do everything
Collaboration was never part of my early career. It felt very military; orders came down from the top and we were told to simply accomplish tasks, so I did just that. I followed orders and did what I was told. I was excited to become a manager so others would then have to follow my orders without pushing back. I quickly realized this was not the way to manage. Once I started asking my team to collaborate, it was clear they had amazing ideas and their individual perspectives provided solutions I would never have seen on my own. Now, I always remember as a manager it is my job to facilitate collaboration within the team because my way is not the only way.
Now at 27, I can look back at my 22-year-old self and laugh because there is not much we have in common when it comes to managing people, growing leaders, and facilitating ideas. Furthermore, I am so incredibly excited to keep learning from our leaders here at RPM Living. I have spent a lot of time self-reflecting, studying, reading, and networking to be a better leader. While all this has been critical to my growth, the one thing that has been the most helpful in shifting my thought process was aligning with leaders at RPM Living on management styles. I am inspired by our great leaders at RPM who are in turn making me a great leader.
From your perspective, what is the industry lacking to support the modern renter and how do you plan to help supply that need?
- When looking at the modern renter, the need that is lacking is a personal connection within marketing. In the multifamily industry, we have the opportunity to make lasting connections with our residents that can lead to years of leasing but often marketing does not set that tone from the start of the conversation with prospects. We boast the price of our units and set the standard that the shopping experience is all about the lowest price. We set the bar for apartment shopping to be solely price-based when we have the opportunity to communicate what makes a community so special. Yes, modern renters care about the price of the unit, but they also care about the quality and characteristics a community has and what truly makes it a place to call home. Renters want to live somewhere that aligns with their lifestyle and personal characteristics and focusing on this – and communicating it directly to them – is a missed opportunity in the industry.
My team and I are supporting this need by marketing our communities to align with the qualities and characteristics of potential renters. We are accomplishing this by creating ad sequencing, something unique to the industry, which allows us to control the ads potential renters see and the order in which they see them. This allows us to effectively communicate kindness and create a personal touch with our renters. We change the focus of the renter from “They have cheaper two-bedroom units” to “I need to learn more about this community.”
There are two types of marketing: the first is black and white; it gets the job done and is the bare minimum. The second is technicolor; it goes the extra mile, and is the marketing that you remember, something like a thoughtful, personalized note from a company to you. This is where my team and I strive to create every campaign in technicolor. We have an opportunity to create magic by serving the modern renter a truly memorable experience and this is our goal when building out every campaign. By transitioning our digital marketing in-house, we have much better control over this process and the ability to pivot more quickly than when we partnered with third-party agencies.