Leveraging Automation for the Digital Generation with Blake Sanford

Please note: The “Power of Change” podcast is designed for audio consumption. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Michael Praeger 

Welcome to The Power of Change, the podcast that delves into the intersection of leadership and technology in the finance world. I’m your host, Michael Prager, the CEO and co-founder of AvidXchange. In each episode, I dive into the leadership topics and industry trends with business leaders, partners, and customers who embrace the power of change. 

0:21  

Michael Praeger 

Super excited today to have a really special guest Blake Sanford. He’s currently the Vice President of Association and Strategic Partners at Property Management Inc. One of the things that Blake has done over his career since joining PMI in 2016 is developed and built association management platform from really the ground up.  

And continues to oversee the management of over 50,000 properties nationwide. He’s really responsible for creating national partnerships and developing programs to help franchise owners build profitable asset management businesses. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Utah Valley University in Utah. And PMI was recently named one of the biggest brands of franchising by Franchising Times.  

So with that, I’d love to jump into it. Blake, you’ve been a veteran of change I think your whole career and certainly an evangelist for change and different things you’ve done. Yeah. I want to start with more of the personal side. When you we’re getting started, you made a big pivot from thinking about dental school and choosing kind of the business aspect. So maybe go back and just tell us about that.  

1:30  

Blake Sanford 

It’s so wild, man, because to think about it now, that was such a long time ago. It feels like a whole ‘nother life ago, but in other ways I’m like, “Wow, that feels like it was just yesterday. So my attitude going like into university and just trying to start a career, I just felt like, man, I wanted something stable. I wanted something secure. Call it like the oldest child syndrome, if you will. 

And so I thought, well, hey, maybe I could be a doctor. A doctor. They make good money. They’ve got like, maybe not the greatest schedule, but I know I can count on it. And then I started doing the math, right? And I’m like, okay, four years, undergrad, four years of grad, plus another residency time period, plus all the debt. 

I’m like, I don’t have time for that, so let’s go, let’s go the dental route. Yeah. So then I decided to go down the dental route and then school wasn’t for me. And this was like the key thing where I decided to change or switch it out. I was heading into my last summer before dental school actually I had just like one exam left, but my wife and I were flying into LAX for just a little quick getaway and we flew in over this massive, like, I don’t even know what it was. 

Huge complex of warehouses and land and real estate. And I wasn’t curious. I wasn’t like interested. I was upset. I was so mad. I looked down and I’m like, somebody owns the land. Somebody owns all that real estate. Somebody owns a business inside those warehouses. Like what are they doing? And why am I not doing that? 

And I was stewing on it for the whole time. And on our last night, my wife, we were at dinner. She goes, “Hey, I don’t know if dentistry is for you, like we should think about business.” And it was like a weight just came off my shoulders and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t wanna do dental school.” We came back, didn’t even take that last exam, and I was kinda like, what do we do now? 

And that’s when we started doing some of our, our endeavors, some other things that were involved with. And then I knew a guy. We lived by him. He was three, four houses away from us and he learned that I wasn’t doing the dental route anymore and he said, “Hey, I’ve got this business that I think you would really like, just kind of the principles of it.  

It’s in the association management space. And I went, what? Like what? What is association management? And so he kind of took me in and gave me a little tour around his office and was just introducing me to the idea of community management and property management. And I just took to it really well. 

And so I worked with him for a while and then PMI. I know we’ll get into the PMI story in a minute, but then PMI, through that connection found me and co-founders just kind of saw what I saw and we teamed up and here I am. I mean, it was not in the plans at all.  

4:05  

Michael Praeger 

That’s great. So you joined PMI in 2016. You know, you’re coming up on 10 years, you know, a handful of different roles since beginning at PMI to working your way out to be in the VP role today. Tell us a little bit about that, like what was the key to kind of that progression in terms of how you navigated your career to get to the role that you’re in today? 

4:27 

Blake Sanford 

Part of it is looking at the history of PMI. So we started in 2008, focused primarily on residential property management with a little bit of commercial, but we did really well at that. We focused on that for eight years. But as we did that, we saw that there was a lot of opportunity in the association management space. 

Like we would manage rental properties inside of these communities, and the board of directors would call our franchise offices like, “Hey, great job on those rentals. Those have typically been our headache. Please come manage our association.” And for years we said no. Like we don’t do that. That’s not in our business model.  

And then we kind of woke up 2015, 2016 and said, well, there’s obviously an opportunity here. Let’s see what we can do. And that’s when I got brought on to kind of build and lead this division, if you will. Things started to take off and we grew really fast. The franchise owners had a lot of natural opportunities, and so as the division grew and we started to see a bigger vision for what this could be long term, we had to build staff around it, and this now is one of our strongest pillars here at PMI. And so with that just comes natural growth and professional growth.  

5:35  

Michael Praeger  

Yeah. So maybe talk a little bit about franchisees themselves and your work in helping them both grow as well as become more efficient.  

5:43  

Blake Sanford 

Yeah. Look, that’s a great question. I think that one of the things that we love about franchising is that we get national brand awareness, but local ownership and you can find both of those in different scenarios. Like you can find a national brand and you can find a local office, but it’s hard to marry the two. And so what we’ve tried to do is leverage the size and scale of our brand to bring the franchise owners better technology, better pricing. Yeah. Better systems and tools, sales methodology that they otherwise might not be able to get. 

And it’s—hey, I mean you give me your take on this, but what we are seeing is—it’s hard to compete against some of these other companies out there, especially when you’re a small, like local shop. And so we’re trying to bring them the power of a big company while still being, a fairly small or mid-size company. But I mean, that’s what we’re seeing. I don’t know. I mean, that’s just our — 

6:36  

Michael Praeger  

I think what you’re hitting on is for a lot of companies, technology’s been a little bit of that equalizer, right? That, you know, small companies can leverage technology to generate some of the scale that otherwise, historically, only big companies could achieve, right?  

And so maybe just on the technology front, maybe, you know, talk about some of the areas that you’ve leaned in to bring technology to the franchisees and help them make their businesses more efficient. 

7:00  

Blake Sanford 

Obviously you’ve got to have a good PMS. I mean that’s, I mean, that’s kind of your core foundational thing, but in order to get the fullness of some of these processes, you gotta have integrations and you got to have setups with other partners and putting kind of that menu together for the franchise owner is something that it’s kind of, it’s difficult to do on your own. 

So we’ve leveraged our relationship with banks and our relationship with our main property management software. And of course there’s other companies out there like AvidXchange and those that we want to bring in house. And I don’t know how much time we have, but I’ve, I’ve got story after story of companies that we’ve acquired where we look at their current operational strategy and it’s just out of control. 

They’ve got five people managing the books and the AR and the AP. We implement our systems. Plug things into the way that we’re doing it with all the stuff we’ve put together. And you go from five staff down to one. Yeah. And as a business owner, it’s like, what are you going to do with that extra money? You can reinvest it into the brand. You can start taking that home, maybe your margins increase a little bit. Man, it’s shocking how people are still doing business today in 2025.  

8:10  

Michael Praeger 

Yeah, I mean what’s really been interesting in terms of our journey as well is by focusing on the paper, manual related business process and just getting it to be digital, right? And moving from the manual paper to digital and kind of the impact that that has. And one of the things that we’re currently really trying to evangelize across not only the industry, but also with our individual customers, is really helping that journey of getting rid of paper checks. 

They’re costly. Virtually 90% of all the fraud happens with checks and just move to a digital environment. And for those that have a younger generation of kids—they’re growing up in an environment where paper checks aren’t even part of their, you know, repertoire about how they pay bills. Right? My son’s 25 and I don’t think he’s ever written a paper check, so— 

9:01  

Blake Sanford 

I’m not as young as your son. I was asked to write a check like literally two weeks ago for this project we had done, and I’m like calling my wife like, do we even have a checkbook. Like, you know, I don’t know if we have one of those. 

9:12  

Michael Praeger 

And then you get into the business environment, right? And it’s just amazing, uh, still how many paper checks are kind of in the world. Right? Maybe you just, you know, on that business process itself—how have you guys navigated some of these key paper-based processes and move them to electronic? And this paper check had kind of one of those processes you focused on. 

9:31  

Blake Sanford 

We joke around our office all the time that you’ve got to tell people 27 times in 27 different ways to get them to change. And so that’s kind of what it is we’re, we’re dealing with. A hundred—close to 200,000 homeowners that are making these payments. And so it, it’s not an easy task, but through our different marketing channels, some of the apps that we’re utilizing, offering some benefit to not using a paper check, those are the things that we’re trying to do. 

But one thing that we’re seeing as well, we’re gonna have like our proactive approach in changing the minds of our customers and how easy it is to do it electronically. But I think we’re also gonna see just a little bit of shift in the general population as certain age groups come into that homeowner role and what they’re used to. 

10:12  

Blake Sanford 

And so there’s gonna be kind of a natural drop off and then there’s gonna be this proactive, like, let’s try to get things updated. But you know, we’re still for the next call it 10, 15 years gonna be dealing with the people that don’t even have a computer. Yeah. Like that’s still gonna be a part of the deal for another little bit. 

10:29  

Michael Praeger 

Yeah. Let’s hope it’s not that long. But, no, I agree with you.  

Blake Sanford  

I hope so too.  

10:35  

Michael Praeger 

So, maybe, you know, touch on a little bit of the future. Are there big areas that you’re thinking about or beginning to lean into related to continuing to make your operations more efficient? And then maybe, does AI play a role in that? 

10:50  

Blake Sanford 

Yeah, AI absolutely plays a role in that. It’s challenging to talk about AI sometimes because I think people get so excited about it. It’s like you can’t have any conversation and not talk about it. We’re just trying to be more realistic about what AI can actually do for us. And so like the vision that I have and what I want to see in technology generally in this space. People talk today, like I want my manager to have a resource that they can go to to find out how to do something. Yeah. Without having to go to the owner of the business or their manager.  

And so we talk about AI, like, “Okay, great. AI is gonna explain to that manager exactly what to do. I’m thinking to myself, if the AI is gonna tell somebody how to do what they need to do, the AI should just do the thing. That’s where my mind goes, and we’ve got a few things in the works and stuff that we’re working on right now. It takes time, but that’s the vision that I have. 

And I don’t know, people get a little bit of anxiety around it because they think they’re gonna work themselves out of a job. And that’s just not at all our intent. Our intent is to use those resources in different ways to continue to grow where you need that human element. We’re still in a service-based business, but if you can combine that with artificial intelligence and some of these just mundane tasks, it’s gonna make your employee happier and the business more profitable. 

12:14  

Michael Praeger  

Absolutely. And we see the same thing, you know, not only in our business, but across customers that we work with. And just what we’ve been able to do is—also what’s interesting is from just a skill development and career development perspective is you employees that have the right mindset and teammates have the mindset to be curious and want to experience new technology and begin using AI-type tools. 

What we’re seeing is, you know, the impact that they have in the organization versus others who maybe. Don’t have that curiosity, and they kind of stay focused in the role they’ve always been doing. Yeah. So I think there’s a natural progression around personal development as well by being curious with some of these new technologies. 

13:00 

Blake Sanford  

Hey, look, and you nailed it. For us—that’s exactly it. You need those people in your business. You have to have them. Yeah. That’s who we want. The ones that are asking questions, trying to push boundaries. You’re not gonna grow to the size that that we are now and where we eventually want to be without that. 

13:17  

Michael Praeger  

So maybe, let’s segue a little bit to mindsets, you know, internally at PMI as well as with your franchisees. What are some of the mindsets or characteristics that you see of these leaders that are being successful not only in growing their businesses, but making them more efficient? And is there a common theme or a mindsets that you’re seeing?  

13:35 

Blake Sanford 

100%. Franchising in general is just a unique space because you get people that come into the franchise brand, typically they haven’t owned a business before. I mean that’s, you know, when you get like these more greenfield startup guys. And so what happens is they get enough revenue that they start to generate, that replaces the income they were making at their W2 job, but now they’re the boss, so they’re making the same money, but they’re the boss and we see that sometimes those offices can start to plateau or maybe have just a gradual growth. 

The ones where we see super success, that’s when they look at this for the long term and what the business actually means, which is why we’re continuing to offer more and more services and products because our franchise owners that come in with that business mentality, they’re trying to build either a legacy for the family or an asset that they want to sell off at time of retirement. And so those are the types of people that are going to reinvest into their business. They’re gonna continue to do that until it gets to a certain size where they feel like they’ve built something. And look, you know, everybody’s got their own desires and hopes and dreams in life, and I think that franchising can allow for that. 

It’s just staying connected to that purpose and instead of just staying in one lane like we’ve seen things happen in the short-term pillar with, you know, a huge increase in inventory. Well, what does that do? Now the bookings go down? Because there’s so many properties out there. Well, let’s shift. Maybe we look at doing midterm with some of those properties and talking to our owners and our investors and shifting what they’re thinking about their investment property. 

They just wanna win and they don’t care how they do it. Yeah, we’re gonna coach and train them on how to do that. That’s the mindset of a franchise owner that is successful and that we’re looking to bring into the brand.  

15:16  

Michael Praeger 

Yeah. It seems like it’s—I’ll put a phrase on it, kind of the growth mindset, right. To basically want to grow and reinvest in both the business as well as themselves, you know, to be the next generation leader.  

Blake Sanford 

Yeah, exactly.  

15:30 

Michael Praeger 

So maybe take it back to you Blake, and if you have to think about maybe what are some of those kind of critical mindsets that you have that allow you to do what you’re doing every day, but also think about, you know, kind of the type of leader that you want to be in the future. 

Are there any kind of mindsets that are top of mind for you that you really kind of relate back to in terms of your secret sauce?  

15:50  

Blake Sanford 

Yeah, so I’ve got a cabinet of people, if you will, in my life, that are well seasoned. They’ve, they’ve been CEOs of big companies but they’re just great people. And so I’ll sit down and I’ll talk with them, and I swear the most common theme I ever hear is to do things as a team. And so for me, like my seat where I’m at, I’m trying to look at things two years, three years, five years down the road on what this could be and what we’ve got to do today to get to that point. 

But it’s all about having a good team. And I know it’s a little cliche, but you got to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. And so, like if I were to bring in our director of operations for the association division, she’s terrific. I mean, she’s just amazing. And she holds the fort down, if you will, on our day-to-day operations. 

So for me it’s all about making sure the team is happy, making sure you’re surrounded by good people that can buy into the vision and culture you want to create, so that it allows you to get above that and start thinking more down the down the line. So I don’t know. I mean, it just seems to be a common theme with everyone that I look up to in business and I hope that I can continue to do that.  

16:57 

Michael Praeger 

Yeah. I think, you know, one of what I see, and I do a lot of coaching and mentoring of other entrepreneurs and young leaders is the concept of if I have to go and hire people or build my team with people that are smarter than me or better than me—what does that say about me as a leader?  

And so you get a lot of people who don’t hire people that are better than them. And what I always learned, and I was fortunate, I learned this at a really young age, is that’s the secret of leverage, is surrounding yourself with people that are better than you and you know, in the different areas that you know that you’re trying to manage. 

And once people kind of understand that, and they see the power of that leverage, then they usually kind of really start accelerating. Sometimes it’s a little bit of a complex related to, well, you know, I’m the CEO, you know, what does it say about me, right? And I’m like, well, the more smarter people have around you, the better CEO you are.  

17:49  

Blake Sanford 

Right. I was just gonna say, like, there’s a little bit of ego there sometimes if you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got to be all knowing.” But I mean, just last night I was sending texts out to people because I didn’t know the answer to something very specific to some of our technology. And I’m like, “Hey, I need a little help understanding this.” And that’s. That’s where it’s got to be. If you’re spending all your brain power trying to know those ins and outs of the little things, you’re not gonna have time to work on the bigger picture stuff. So maybe a better way to say it would be you got to hire people that are smarter than you in the areas that are important to them. 

18:15 

Michael Praeger 

Well said. Well said. So maybe just, I’m also always interested in kind of the personal routines that different leaders have. Tell us about those. It’s like are there any—whether daily, weekly, kind of monthly routines that you do that allow you to be kind of the best that you can be in leading your business? 

19:35 

Blake Sanford 

Yeah. I don’t know if this is gonna connect for a lot of people, but we hired—my wife and I—we hired a fitness coach last year, and it is like diet, nutrition, workout plans, we’re in the gym six days a week, if not seven, but on that seventh day, it’s more of a sauna day. 

But I can tell you, man, I feel better mentally. I feel better physically. I’ve got more energy every single day. So we don’t miss, like, we don’t miss. That is something that just is always there. We talk about business sure. But it’s like life changing when you start to take care of yourself, right? And just be there for your people. 

And so that’s one of the things that’s just a constant for us is just physical activity, eating right, being healthy. And then I don’t know if this is like a daily or a weekly, maybe like a more of a monthly routine, but I hold sort of a coaching call once a month. For all of our franchise owners. 

And part of that is I do about five to 10 minutes talking about just a health tip. And so I’m trying to bring to top of mind like our sleep, I mean our taking a walk in the middle of the day. This is a business where people get stressed out and there’s a lot of things going on. And so I try to put that top of mind that as the owner of a business, you’ve gotta take care of yourself. 

And so on a monthly basis, I’m also thinking like, what are some things we can focus on now that might help improve my life and the life of our franchise owners?  

29:58 

Michael Praeger  

Excellent. I think, you know, there’s a lot to be said about, you know, investing in yourself so you’re both mentally and physically the best you can be, and then you’ll naturally be better for your team. 

20:12 

Michael Praeger 

Well, this has been super fantastic in terms both understanding the success of PMI and kind of what makes PMI really unique in the market and kind of how you’ve leaned into, you know, helping your franchisees both grow and scale their back office to be more efficient. And then kind of the personal side of leadership.  

So just maybe wrapping up some takeaways that I’ve taken away from today’s call, which has been great, is the leverage of technology and automation. And what you talked about is being able to go from five to one in terms of kind of back office staff that you see on a lot of the acquisitions that PMI gets involved with. And I think that’s generally true for some of the leverage that we see across the industry as well, is just there’s significant kind of people, labor, leverage that technology provides. I love the discussion about to get an impact on the digital generation.  

A lot of this technology adoption is just going to keep accelerating because the new people coming into the workforce are digital. And I think it then goes back to, I love the transition we made to the mindsets and super success that you’ve seen across the franchisees is really around their mindset of growth and investing not only in their business, but also in themselves for kind of the future.  

And I think investing in yourself involves kind of how we wrapped up—coaching, mentoring, hiring people that are smarter, better than you, and those disciplines that you need to have great talent in and then just how you take care of yourself, right? Whether it’s mentally, physically, hitting the gym. Yeah. Uh, I’m certainly not a six day a week in the gym. I’m more of a, you know, probably two, three times a week try to kind of mix it up with some kind of game sport, whether it’s tennis or skiing on the weekends. Because I think what happens is people just get busy, right? 

And then you let your business and your schedule drive you versus being intentional about, “I’m only going to be at my best if I invest in myself as well. And usually invest in yourself first. One of the things that’s great about these different podcasts is taking away different tips or nuggets from one leader to another. And you’ve given us plenty of tips and nuggets today. Blake, thank you. And thanks for being on this episode of Power of Change.  

22:28 

Blake Sanford  

Yeah, hey, no problem. I’m happy to be here. It was great.  

22:32 

Michael Praeger 

Thanks for listening to the Power of Change presented by AvidXchange. If you like what you’ve heard, subscribe to our channel and leave a five-star review. While you’re waiting for the next episode. Head on over to avidxchange.com for our latest research reports and business insights. And if you’re interested in learning more about accounts payable automation from AvidXchange, click the link in our show notes that connect with our experts. Thanks again for listening to the Power of Change. We’ll see you next time.