PMI Elevation manages about 175 residential properties in South Metro Denver with a team of 4. Broker owner Jim Shonts started with a handful of doors, a lot of sticky notes, and a missed move-in that left a tenant waiting with a moving truck. Today every move-in, owner onboarding, fee and compliance step runs as a documented workflow. The team has run about 13,000 workflows and completed more than 146,000 tasks, and the business keeps running when Jim is out of the office.
The Company
PMI Elevation is a residential property management company and part of the Property Management Inc. franchise network. It manages condos, small multifamily buildings and single-family homes for property owners across South Metro Denver.
Property management runs on deadlines. Leases start on fixed dates, owners sign contracts, tenants move in and out, and every lease carries fees and obligations. Jim, who holds a degree in operations management, describes PMI Elevation’s lease as “40 something pages long.” Each of those pages can create a task someone has to remember.
The Problem: A Business That Lived in One Person’s Head
When Jim joined the franchise around 2018, he expected detailed systems. He found rough guidelines instead. “The reality is it was emails, checklists, maybe a spreadsheet thing that who knows where they exist today,” he says. That created three problems.
Missed deadlines. At around 25 doors, Jim was running everything himself. A lease started on a set day and the move-in step slipped. “Tenant’s waiting, moving trucks all there, everything is ready for them to move into that house and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do,” he says. Nothing had flagged the date.
Knowledge that walked out the door. The team has ranged from 2 to 5 people. Each time someone left, what they knew left with them unless it was written down.
Money left on the table. Lease fees and charges are easy to forget. “If it’s client funds and we forget to charge a tenant, there’s money left on the table,” Jim says.
Why can’t a growing property manager keep it all in their head?
“When it’s five properties, easy to keep in your head. When you get to 25, it starts getting harder, when you get to 175, it’s impossible.”
The Decision: A System That Could Grow With the Team
Jim looked at checklist apps and other tools on the market. Most could hold a list. Few could hand a step to the next person once the previous step was done. “It wasn’t something that would grow with me and be able to have other people come in and take over when a step hit a stage,” he says. He chose Process Street for its flow and ease of use.
The Solution: Every Process Documented, Every Step Owned
Video-backed workflows that train new hires
Jim documented each process step by step, with dropdowns for the choices a property manager makes along the way. Then he recorded himself doing the work and placed the video at the top of the step. When a new team member joins, they are assigned the task and learn it from the video and the steps. If they get stuck, they tag a teammate in the comments.
Training used to mean a new hire watching Jim on a Zoom call for eight hours while he worked. Now, in his words, “the training component on a new team member is drastically reduced.”
Ownership by name
Jim’s goal was simple: “I wanna remove my face from the task.” Each step now carries the name of the team member who owns it. “Because their face is on that process and that step, they own it,” he says. Team members suggest improvements to the steps they run, and the processes keep getting better.
Conditional logic for fees and compliance
PMI Elevation uses conditional logic to route each situation down the right path. Take an HOA violation: when a tenant doesn’t cut or water the grass, the workflow asks who the fine should be assessed to, follows that path, and makes sure the charge goes out so the owner is reimbursed. Jim calls conditional logic one of the biggest changes in how the team works.
A zero-overdue rule and a weekly review
Managers check every day how many tasks are due, when they’re due, and who needs help. Jim’s mantra is that “every day I want to see the overdue tasks as low or as close to zero.” Resident services, property managers and client specialists hand work to each other constantly, so one late step affects everyone downstream.
Every Wednesday the team meets to work through issues. Most fixes are changes to a process. Jim sorts each problem the same way: “people, process, or system.”
Owners onboarded in the same system
PMI Elevation brings its clients into the process too. New owners answer onboarding questions inside the workflow, and the team refers back to those answers often. The result is a historical record of what was done, who did it and when.
The Results: A Business, Not a Job
The numbers show the scale. PMI Elevation has run about 13,000 workflows and completed more than 146,000 tasks, with a team of 4 managing about 175 doors.
146,000+ tasks completed
About 13,000 workflow runs across 175 doors, with a team of 4
Calm when the owner is away. Jim gave his interview from a conference while his team ran the business. “That gives me a little bit of kind of calm that I have a system in place with deadlines and everything that the team is running, even if I’m not there,” he says.
Time moved to higher-value work. Handing tasks to the team freed Jim to focus on selling PMI Elevation’s services to new clients.
Flexible service offerings. Because each client’s program lives in a workflow, the team can offer different service levels and track which client is on which program. “You don’t have to keep it in our head anymore,” Jim says.
A foundation for automation. Detailed documentation is now letting the team automate parts of its work with AI, one step at a time. “If I didn’t have those processes documented to the detail I had, I couldn’t automate it,” Jim says.
Asked what would happen without the system, Jim didn’t hesitate: “I think it would be utter chaos.” For a small business owner, the bigger value is what the system makes possible.
What is Process Street worth to PMI Elevation?
“It literally makes it a business as compared to a job. For me, that’s the value of it because now it’s all documented. It’s all in place, it’s running. The team knows what they’re expected to do.”
What Other Property Managers Can Learn
Jim’s advice to an owner still running everything from their head and inbox: an emergency is always coming, and a system is what lets the team pick up exactly where things stand. “It becomes the team heartbeat,” he says.
See how other teams run rentals in the property management software guide, start from these property management workflow templates, or browse the full template library. You can also read how teams build standard operating procedures that new hires can follow on day one.